Cultures of Knowledge in Transition: Early Modern Letters Online as an Experiment in Collaboration, 2009-2018

Cultures of Knowledge (CofK) is not a typical research project. It has not been devoted from the outset to testing a historical thesis or producing a set of traditional research publications. For most of its history, its main objective has been to pilot a collaboratively populated, international, digital union catalogue, Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO); but its intentions are not exhausted by resource creation or IT systems development. Instead, CofK’s deeper purpose has been to conduct a social and cultural experiment investigating the conditions in which individual scholars, projects, repositories, and publishers are willing to pool their data. Its research objective has been to discover the scholarly standards, technical systems, social relations, and cultural norms required for a community of scholars with many needs and problems in common to collaborate in unprecedented ways. The title of this essay, ‘Cultures of Knowledge in Transition’, is therefore intended to refer to more than the evolution of a single research project: instead, it views the project’s history as a window on the broader transition taking places as research communities develop means of tackling problems far too large, not only for the lone researcher or individual research project, but for single institutions, disciplines, or even national academic communities to solve on their own. More specifically, this paper narrates the project's conception, its efforts at generating fresh data, developing an initial system, building a community, and re-engineering the system to curate data collaboratively, and concludes by surveying the emerging prospects for future collaborative systems design, development, population, and research experimentation.