Project update: new EMLO calendar and new CofK podcasts available

New calendar: Joseph Justus Scaliger

We are delighted to announce the publication of our newest calendar in EMLO, that of the 1,669 letters of Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540 – 1609). In 2012, the eight-volumed edition of The Correspondence of Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) published by the esteemed Librairie Droz, Geneva, under the direction of Max Engammare, was launched in style at the Divinity School of Oxford’s Bodleian Library at a reception hosted by Cultures of Knowledge. We are delighted now, through our continued collaboration with the Librairie Droz, to be able to make available within EMLO the metadata for this extensive correspondence.

The 2012 edition contains many letters never printed before and it reflects seven extraordinary years of meticulous work conducted at the Warburg Institute, University of London. Funded by Professor Anthony Grafton of Princeton as a result of his award of the 2002 Balzan Prize for History of the Humanities, the Scaliger Project, housed at the Warburg, was home to the edition’s editors Dr Paul Botley and Dr Dirk van Miert. The eight volumes that emerged from this collaboration contain every letter known to have been written by or to Scaliger.

For further details on the Scaliger correspondence, take a look at his dedicated catalogue page in EMLO, or go straight into the calendar and have a browse. We are delighted to add the metadata from these letters to the growing thousands in our union catalogue (over 85,000 letters at present, with more catalogues queuing up for publication). As well as providing a single, unified access point to myriad manuscript, print, and digital resources, by standardising data on the who, when, and where of many thousands of early modern letters, EMLO opens up possibilities for exploring and analysing these networks that were simply not possible in the age of print. We hope to be able to update you on our further plans in this area in the not-too-distant future; watch this space!

If you would like a notification when EMLO publishes a new catalogue of correspondence, please sign up to the Cultures of Knowledge mailing list, here. To find out more about EMLO and our work with individual scholars, editors, publishers, and projects, take a look at our About and Contribute pages, or contact us.

New podcasts available

In other exciting news, podcasts are now available from last term’s CofK evening seminar series, ‘The Digital Humanist: Open Resources, Shared Standards, Virtual Communities’.

This series of papers looked at the digital humanities specifically in terms of the individual and the community. It focused on shared knowledge and shared tools, and on the opportunities and challenges involved in providing collaborative platforms or resources. These issues are important for the field and for Cultures of Knowledge as a project; particularly at this time as we expand and develop EMLO.

If you weren’t able to attend, the podcasts offer the chance to hear a wonderful collection of papers covering a range of issues facing the academy in today’s connected world.

  • Melissa Terras discusses the ‘Transcribe Bentham’ project and presents results, themes and issues which have emerged from this successful initiative.
  • Kathryn Eccles’ talk, ‘Looking into the Crowd: Understanding the Users of Digital Heritage Collections’, offers insights from the Oxford Internet Institute’s work on understanding the usage and impact of digitised scholarly resources.
  • Sally Shuttleworth and Victoria Van Hyning introduce some of the issues being explored in ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries’, one of the large projects funded by the AHRC under the Science in Culture theme.
  • Eero Hyvönen discusses the building of a national Linked Data content infrastructure in Finland, focusing on two public services: ONKI Ontology Library Service for publishing and using shared domain ontologies, and Linked Data Finland, a platform for publishing metadata schemas and linked datasets as services.
  • Howard Hotson concludes the series with ‘Collaboration, Early Modern Letters Online, and Horizon 2020: The Creation of One Virtual Community to Reassemble Another’, discussing prospects for the further development of the digital platform and union catalogue Early Modern Letters Online.