Videos of twenty-one papers and keynotes from our 2011 conference Intellectual Geography: Comparative Studies, 1550-1700 (Oxford, 5-7 September 2011) are now available on the conference website or via our Vimeo channel (with more hopefully to come). Organised by Howard Hotson, the event introduced and tested the novel concept of ‘intellectual geography’ as a means of appreciating and understanding the organisation of intellectual activity and the dissemination of ideas within space and across time, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. A taster - Miles Ogborn’s keynote exploration of ‘What is Intellectual Geography?’ - is provided below. Happy viewing!

Detail from the graphic.

Melissa Terras from the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities has, with the support of the UCLCDH, created a wonderful infographic of this exciting field. While not completely comprehensive, the visualization combines data from a wide variety of online sources across a range of measurable criteria, and is definitely worth a look. The infographic is available via the UCLCDH Flickr Stream or as a print download (pdf).

A seventeenth-century rendering of a little horn (or screech) owl.

A day conference on History Comes to Life: Seventeenth-Century Natural History, Medicine and the New Science‚ will be held on Friday 27 April 2012 from 9am to 5.30pm at The Royal Society in London. Organised by our industrious Martin Lister (1639-1712) Research Fellow Anna Marie Roos, and held to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Lister – Royal Physician and the first arachnologist and conchologist  –  the event will explore the often neglected relationship between medicine and natural history in the seventeenth-century. Featuring an exciting line-up of ten international authorities on early modern science, the meeting will dovetail out from Lister’s work to consider to what extent practices and technologies of natural history changed between the Renaissance and the seventeenth century. It will also explore how the acquisition of natural history knowledge and new schemes of taxonomy influenced the perception and treatment of animals for medical and experimental use. As well as support from Cultures of Knowledge, the conference is sponsored by The John Fell Fund, The British Society for the History of Science, The Royal Society, and the Wellcome Trust. The conference fee is a bargain at £40 (full price) or £30 (student/unwaged). For further details and to register online, please visit the conference webpage. Please address queries to felicity.henderson(at)royalsociety.org.

The new volume of J. A. Comenii Opera Omnia, 15/IV, appeared with Academia (Prague) in November 2011. Prepared by Martin Steiner, Markéta Klosová, and others, the volume builds on three installments already published under 15 and continues the ongoing work of the Opera Didactia Omnia corpus. The edition encompasses a significant part of Comenius’s activities in Hungary, including complete versions of textbooks prepared for the first two classes of his Latin school, and includes a full editorial apparatus as well as notes, comments, and summaries of information on edited works already available in English. For further information and to order a copy, please visit the publisher’s website.

The letters of Jan Patočka, prepared by Věra Schifferová, have also been released in two volumes (1931-77) by Oikoymenh. A leading Czech philosopher of the twentieth century, Patočka was an eminent interpreter of Comenius’s life and work who corresponded extensively with other students of the pedagogue worldwide such as Milada Blekastad, Stanislav Sousedík, Julie Nováková, Jiřina Popelová, Josef Brambora, Antonín Škarka, Dmytro Čyževskyj, Klaus Schaller, Marcelle Denis, Franz Hofmann, and George Henry Turnbull. The letters, published in Czech, shed important light on Comenius as well as on the evolution of scholarly attitudes towards him. For further information and to order a copy, please visit the publisher’s website.

EMLO screenshots captivate the crowd.

Chris Fletcher sets the scene.

Festive designers and systems developers.

The Lister and Lhwyd research teams.

Stephen Clucas and Philip Beeley.

Will Poole and Richard Sharpe.

After a very busy year in private alpha, the Project celebrated the imminent public beta launch of our free union catalogue – Early Modern Letters Online − with a festive reception last Friday. Over eighty students, scholars, librarians, and digital humanists joined us in the historic environment of the Bodleian Library’s Divinity School, where – over mulled wine, seasonal canapés, and mince pies – they were treated to contextual remarks from Dr Chris Fletcher (Keeper of Special Collections) and Professor Howard Hotson (Director of Cofk), and a full demonstration of the capabilities of the catalogue’s search and discovery, and editorial, interfaces by Project Coordinator Dr James Brown. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the success of the evening, with a special shout-out to the Bodleian’s Wilma Minty for arranging things with her usual flair.

The EMLO homepage.

EMLO Edit, the editorial interface.

Early Modern Letters Online – which currently contains 60,480 epistolary records – federates basic metadata from eight contributing sources (including 48,695 sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century records drawn from the existing card index of correspondence in the Bodleian Library), and allows for their manipulation and further enhancement by means of a sophisticated editorial environment. It will be available to the public from early January 2012.

To stay informed, please watch this space or join the Mailing List. In the meantime, we wish you all a very Happy Holidays!

‘A remarkable project titled Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters seeks to reconstruct pan-European intellectual networks by creating a modern equivalent. Many leading thinkers of the time were forced by war to flee from their homes and so left their papers all over the Continent. The digital revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, says Howard Hotson, professor of early modern intellectual history at the University of Oxford, have enabled a team based in Oxford (with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) to build ‘radically multinational forms of international collaboration of a kind which was effectively impossible before’, so as to reassemble in virtual form long-scattered learned correspondences. The project should transform the study of topics such as the Scientific Revolution…’

The article – mischievously entitled ‘Surfdom’ – goes on to raise some important caveats about electronic forms of humanistic research, even though for most digital projects these will serve as reminders of pitfalls and best practice rather than highlights of new or emerging issues. The emphasis on the necessity of crafting digital tools both in the service of research questions and alongside more conventional modes of scholarship is very much up our street as a full-spectrum academic enterprise, while some of the author’s concerns regarding the accessibility, sustainability, and especially accountability of large-scale online resources are also well-taken. Here’s the article; there’s a lively debate in the comments section and on Twitter.