This is not an early April fool but rather a gentle (and genuine!) reminder for those who are interested in joining ‘Networking Archives‘, the AHRC-funded project with which Cultures of Knowledge is involved at present: submissions of applications to attend a series of training schools and a colloquium, together with the chance to author a chapter in an edited volume, will close this coming Monday, 1 April. Details of the opportunity may be found in an earlier post on this blog, as well as on the Networking Archives website.
As applications stream in, the project’s Queen Mary University of London research assistant, Dr Esther van Raamsdonk, and I are in the thick of disambiguating and identifying the authors and the recipients of letters to be found within the Stuart State Papers. As we work, we are reminded at every turn how extraordinarily fortunate we are to glimpse, albeit fleetingly, aspects of the lives of so many early modern individuals—from the movers and shakers of the period, to those who, but for the survival of a letter in this archive, would have slipped through the net of the historical record and remain unknown to us today. We work with a tool developed in Cambridge by Dr Sebastian Ahnert, and when we set out at the beginning of last month we faced approximately 55,000 unique expressions of names in need of our time and attention. The workflow we have adopted is similar to that used ten years ago (at the beginning of the Cultures of Knowledge project) for the disambiguation of the authors and recipients described within metadata of the Bodleian card catalogue. As so often in the Early Modern Letters Online editorial team, the enormity of what lies ahead is helped by the dialogue and communication maintained when at the coalface. If you would like to be involved in these conversations and are interested in where the project will be taking this data, and if you wish to focus on the analysis of early modern correspondence networks, the offer to join us is open, but the deadline is set for Monday …
Good luck!
The delivery of post. Detail from Christoff Weigel, ‘Abbildung Der Gemein-Nützlichen Haupt-Stände Von denen Regenten …’ (Regenspurg, 1698), p. 160. (Image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, obj. no. RP-P-1896-A-19368-1602)