Erasmus and the Sixteenth-Century Respublica Litteraria: Of Letters, Data, and Networks

2013 Seminar Series / Thursday 7 November, 2013

The famous humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam presided over one of the best-known networks of correspondence during the Renaissance, encompassing over 700 correspondents and about 3,200 individual letters. Using the example of his epistolary network, this presentation will introduce the audience to an ongoing PhD project that explores the application of the tools and methods of Digital Humanities within the research context of the sixteenth-century Republic of Letters. Following general remarks on data modeling and metadata standards, covered topics comprise multi-facetted attribute and relational data, network visualizations, and historical GIS.