Digital approaches to the Republic of Letters: network research, text mining, and infrastructures Utrecht University, 17-18 November (Thursday & Friday) Key-note speakers and provisional titles: Sepideh Alassi (University of Basel – Digital Humanities Lab): The Bernoulli-Euler Online Project (BEOL) Eero Hyvönen (Aalto University/University of Helsinki – HELDIG): LetterSampo – Historical Letters on the Semantic Web:…

Het ERC SKILLNET project over de Republiek der Letteren zoekt iemand die kan helpen om namen van briefschrijvers uit de periode 1400-1815 te identificeren. Toelichting: SKILLNET is bezig een bestand op te schonen met ca 65 duizend metadata van brieven die bewaard worden in een dozijn bibliotheken en archieven in Nederland (de Catalogus Epistularum Neerlandicarum)….

In the early modern period, scientists and scholars were part of scientific communities with a strong sense of a shared history, a collective identity, and a common goal. The recently published book ‘Memory and Identity in the Learned World: Community Formation in the Early Modern World of Learning and Science’, edited by PhD candidate Koen Scholten …

Op vrijdagmiddag 6 mei van 15.00 tot 17.00 uur (met een borrel na afloop) gaan we, met hopelijk velen van jullie, aan de slag met data. Eind dit jaar zal het SKILLNET-project afgelopen zijn en daarmee helaas ook CEMROL. Je hebt als vrijwilliger al veel werk verzet, maar we willen graag nog een laatste eindsprint inzetten. De data-eindsprint vindt…

For a little side project, that has no particular reason or occasion, Dirk van Miert is collecting accounts of how scholars got their ‘Allen & Allen’, viz. P.S. and H.M. Allen’s edition of Desiderius Erasmus’ correspondence. Over the years, he has noticed this is a particular table-talk theme at specialized conferences, and he thought it…

The Spring 2020 issue of EU Research, a magazine showcasing research sponsored by the ERC and other agencies, includes a two-page interview with Dirk van Miert about the SKILLNET project. Read it below (or open the link: https://issuu.com/euresearcher/docs/digital_magazine_eur22/72):

The SKILLNET project seeks to appoint as soon as possible a datamanager. We are looking for someone who is available for 2 or perhaps 3 days a week, to assist 2 postdocs and 2 PhD student in transforming paper data into Excel sheets and in cleaning up proper names and place names by basic research…

We are looking for enthusiastic Bachelor students to join the Skillnet team as interns in 2019-2020. The project ‘Sharing Knowledge in Learned and Literary Networks’ (SKILLNET) studies early modern scholarship, concentrating on scientists who transcended religious, political and linguistic boundaries. From about 1500 to around 1800, these scholars belonged to a European knowledge-based civil society…

On 7-9 November 2019, the SKILLNET project will organize a conference at Utrecht University on memory and identity in the early modern learned world. This conference aims at bringing together historians of knowledge, art historians, heritage scholars, philosophers of identity, museum curators, sociologists, literary historians, etc., who are studying cults of memory and community formation…

Dirk van Miert wrote a review of Hans Bots’ De republiek der letteren. De Europese intellectuele wereld, 1500-1760, Nijmegen, 2018. You can find it here in Open Access.

On 14 December 2018 Dirk van Miert was on the Dutch radio programme Utrecht is Wakker of RTV Utrecht to talk about SKILLNET’s crowdsourcing platform CEMROL(from 08:36 onwards).

On 14 December SKILLNET will launch its innovative crowdsourcing platform for harvesting the metadata of letters from scanned versions of printed letter collections: Collecting Epistolary Metadata of the Republic of Letters (CEMROL). All welcome! Admission is free, but please register via R.O.Buning@uu.nl. Program: 12:30 Welcome (with lunch) Dr Dirk van Miert (project leader, Utrecht University): Introduction Prof….

Koen Scholten and Manuel Llano wrote a blogpost for Shells and Pebbles: ‘Rethinking the Republic of Letters: Two Perspectives on the Early Modern Learned Community’.

The Leeuwarder Courant of 13 June 2018 published an interview (in Dutch) with our former intern Samantha Sint Nicolaas and Manuel Llano, one of our PhD students, about their research on the epistolary network of Anna Maria van Schurman. Samantha compiled an inventory of van Schurman’s correspondence and Manuel created a visualisation of her network. Special attention is given…

The SKILLNET project has two vacancies for a 3-year postdoctoral appointment, starting on 1 September 2018; one for a sociological project and one for text mining. For more information and to apply, see the AcademicTransfer website: Postdoctoral Researcher The Republic of Letters as an Institution for Collective Action (1.0 FTE) Postdoctoral Researcher A digital discourse…

Last week a special issue of Renaissance Studies edited by Arjan van Dixhoorn, Samuel Mareel and Bart Ramakers has appeared: ‘The Knowledge Culture of the Netherlandish Rhetoricians’. On 2 March it will be presented to Hilde de Ridder-Symoens and Herman Pleij at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, and three scholars from different disciplines will shortly…

Digital humanities have clearly been on the rise in the past decade, leading to many ambitious plans and new initiatives. Yet often the plans have been more visible than the results. So are the developments in this field, we may ask, really as promising in practice as they seem on paper? This seminar, part of…

We are very happy to announce the call for papers for this year’s Historical Network Research Conference in Brno. For details please check the information below and the conference website at http://www.phil.muni.cz/relig/hnr2018/ Historical Network Research Conference 2018 Masaryk University, Brno, the Czech Republic 10th September 2018 (pre-conference tutorials and workshops) 11th-13th September 2018 (conference) Organizing institutions…

Our rediscovery of a seventeenth-century postmasters’ trunk in the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague, containing some twenty-six hundred undelivered letters mostly sent from France, offers the opportunity to rethink what constitutes an archive and how to approach it. First, we argue that understanding the process of loss, destruction, and survival of collections is a…

On 9 March, there will be a lecture on the occasion of the publication of Hans Bots’ De Republiek der Letteren. De Europese intellectuele wereld, 1500-1760 with Hans Bots and Dirk van Miert in Boekhandel Roelants in Nijmegen.  

A (NEW) REPUBLIC OF LETTERS: INTELLECTUAL COMMUNITIES, GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER International Summer School, Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel Research Association 29 July – 9 August 2018 German Literature Archive Marbach Application deadline: 28 February 2018  Each Republic of Letters is based on words. They are, according to Anthony Grafton, ‘worlds made by words’ (2009). The booming research…

Dirk van Miert will be speaking about early modern epistolography in the Netherlands at the international study conference ‘L’epistolografia di antico regime’ in Viterbo from 15 to 17 February 2018 (invitation only).

On 2 March, Hans Bots’ De Republiek der Letteren. De Europese intellectuele wereld, 1500-1760 will be presented in the Vossiuszaal of Leiden University Library. This book is a Dutch translation of the revised edition of Hans Bots en Françoise Wacquet’s La République des Lettres, which was first published in 1997 (Paris: Belin/Brussels: De Boeck). Paul Hoftijzer will…

The COST Action IS 1310 “Reassembling the Republic of Letters” is in its final year of work, and will meet one last time to pull together the results of the research and structured discussions carried out during the past four years. As an MC Member of the Action, Dirk van Miert will be attending. A…

Dirk van Miert will speak at the XXXVIIIth International Sunbelt Social Network Conference Utrecht from 26 June to 1 July 2018 about: ‘Reassembling the Republic of Letters, 1400-1800’. Organized session at the XXVIII Sunbelt Conference, June 26-July 1, 2018 at Utrecht University ‘Challenges in archaeological and historical network analysis’ Over the last decades, network analysis has…