THE PAST’S DIGITAL PRESENCE
12:45-2:15
Mapping History
Room 120
- Julia Mansfield/Scott Spillman, Stanford University, “Mapping Eighteenth-Century Intellectual Networks”
The Republic of Letters united European and American scholars, scientists, and statesmen before the modern, university-based academic world supplanted it. Participants used letters as their main form of communication, and those letters remain as valuable evidence of far-flung exchanges within Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean. What did those correspondence networks look like? In what sense might they be described as “cosmopolitan”? Benjamin Franklin serves as a natural test case for the model of an eighteenth-century cosmopolitan. His duties as a legislator and diplomat created an enormous volume of correspondence. We analyzed approximately 4,300 letters written or received by Franklin and classified them according to recipient and type (personal, official, or business). When we graph letters by type during Franklin’s residence in Paris (1776-1785), the volume of official correspondence overwhelms the volume of private correspondence. Merchants, financiers, and civil servants are among the top correspondents in Franklin’s network across his lifetime. Data from Franklin’s letters show that diplomacy and trade created the cosmopolitan scope of his network. Surprisingly, Franklin’s network is more cosmopolitan in scope than that of a quintessential member of the Republic of Letters, the French philosophe Voltaire. Yet its cosmopolitan character depends on business and bureaucracy, not just philosophy.
- Scott Nesbit, University of Virginia, “Layers of the Past: GIS, Social Process, and Contingency in Historical Mapping”
Scholars have increasingly called for new tools that would enable them to organize the large digital collections that are increasingly available online. In a previous era of massive documentary publishing, historians at the Carnegie Institution and elsewhere found that the Atlas of Historical Geography of the United States provided a helpful addition to the large collections of suddenly accessible documentary records. This paper takes its cue from those efforts to suggest that an online atlas would be a useful complement the recent large-scale digitization of historical documents.
- Simon Wiles, Dharma Drum Buddhist College, Taiwan, “Buddhist Authority Databases”
The nexus of Digital Humanities and Buddhist Studies presents a number of interesting challenges, and has already met with some notable successes. In this paper some of the challenges that we face are introduced, and some approaches and solutions which have proven beneficial in our work at Dharma Drum Buddhist College are discussed. Some general principles are outlined, which are applicable to all kinds of digital resources, and which are aimed at ensuring that our digital resources are as valuable as possible, for as long as possible. In particular it is argued that, as far as digital resources are concerned, the integrity of content and data should always take priority over modes of consumption, and that data structures and interfaces must be designed with inter-operability and integrability as a main concern. The Buddhist Authority Databases are introduced as an example of a project designed according to these principles which meets several specific needs in Buddhist studies. Finally, the /Gāosēng Zhuàn/ (高僧傳) GIS project is presented as a very brief case-study which demonstrates some of the many benefits of this approach.
