With work at Early Modern Letters Online continuing apace and a number of different strands and projects being juggled simultaneously, it is always encouraging to announce exciting new opportunities and promote collaboration. One such opportunity involves Cultures of Knowledge‘s Arts and Humanities Research Council [AHRC] funded research project Networking Archives. As explained in an earlier post on this site entitled ‘Announcing “Networking Archives: Assembling and analysing a meta-archive of correspondence, 1509–1714″‘, Networking Archives is a collaboration between Cultures of Knowledge, Dr Ruth Ahnert (Queen Mary University of London), and Dr Sebastian Ahnert (University of Cambridge), with Gale State Papers Online. At present, preparatory work is underway to prepare and interrogate the metadata collated from the correspondence to be found within the Tudor and Stuart State Papers — both domestic and foreign — alongside the data contained in Early Modern Letters Online. This combination of datasets, together with use of the project’s accompanying tools and infrastructure, will enable researchers to query and analyse their own epistolary metadata and to pose new kinds of questions on the history of the different forms of ‘intelligencing’ between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries.

One of the ambitions of Networking Archives is to bring together and to foster a community of scholars, data analysts, and developers who share an interest in correspondences that overlap and intersect with the datasets under investigation. Applications are being accepted currently for participation in a scheme that involves a series of training schools and a colloquium. These events, scheduled to take place in Cambridge and Oxford over the course of the next two years, are intended to provide hands-on training in data collation and curation, in network analysis, and in basic coding. Successful applicants will be offered the opportunity to develop their research into chapters that will be published in an edited collection.

Further details of these events, and the conditions regarding application, may be found on the Networking Archives project news page.

On a day in which Mary-Ann Constantine from the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies [CAWCS] at the University of Wales gave an inspirational paper on travel writing and the letters exchanged between the antiquarian Richard Gough and the naturalist and writer Thomas Pennant (introducing the former with the show-stopping phrase ‘Gough tends to be known most widely as a shelfmark’), it is a tremendous pleasure to be circulating news of a forthcoming workshop that will explore how ‘antiquarian science informed collecting’ and collections in the’ early modern scholarly academy’. Organized by the historians of science Anna Marie Roos and Vera Keller, this event will take place on 1 and 2 April at the Society of Antiquaries of London and will examine the work of many of the early modern figures who crossed the divide between natural philosophy and antiquarianism. Full details of the programme and speakers, together with information regarding registration for the workshop, may be found here.