Letters, Ideas and Information Technology: Using digital corpora of letters to disclose the circulation of knowledge in the 17th century

1. Circulation of Knowledge and
Letters
The scientific revolution of the 17
th
century was
driven by countless discoveries in Europe and
overseas in the observatory, in the library, in the
workshop and in society at large. There was a
dramatic increase in the amount of information,
giving rise to new knowledge, theories and
world images. But how were new elements of
knowledge picked up, processed, disseminated
and – ultimately – accepted in broad circles
of the educated community? A consortium of
universities, research institutes and cultural
heritage institutions has started a project called
CKCC
1
to meet this research question, building
a multidisciplinary collaboratory to analyze
a machine-readable and growing corpus of
letters of scholars who lived in the 17th-century
Dutch Republic. Until the publication of the
first scientific journals in the 1660s, letters
were by far the most direct and important
means of communication between intellectuals.
Therefore the 17th-century Republic of Letters
offers an ideal case for exploring the answers to
this question.
Researchers want to uncover patterns in letters
that are indicative for the circulation of
knowledge, patterns that reveal the emergence
of complex, collective phenomena in modern
science. However, they face some fundamental
problems with finding such patterns in letters.
One cannot know in advance the nature of these
patterns, and only few categorical hypotheses
can be tested by simply data mining the letters.
Purported patterns cannot be tested against the
letters, because the heterogeneous information
on which these patterns are based cannot be
gleaned from the texts, but need considerable
interpretation and contextualization.
Here is a short list of the problems: (i) the
letters are not uniformly available; (ii) the 17
th
century language varieties are not standardised
and pose a challenge for language technology;
(iii) much interpretation is needed to resolve
references to people, places, dates, ideas and
instruments; interpretations are complicated by
the heterogeneity of annotations; (iv) it is not
clear how to set up visualisations of patterns that
are really informative to the historian of science.
These four types of problems will be used to
report on the methodology of the project and on
its results so far.
2. Information technology as a
humanities’ observatory
2.1. Availability of the Letters
CKCC limits itself to the ca. 20,000 letters
written by scholars that were active in the
Netherlands: René Descartes, Hugo Grotius,
Constantijn Huygens, Christiaan Huygens,
Caspar Barlaeus, Jan Swammerdam and
Anthony van Leeuwenhoek. Modern editions of
these correspondences—already published or in
an advanced state of production by members of
CKCC—form the basis of the digitised texts. The
letters, once converted to a minimal TEI format,
will then be made available through e-Laborate,
2
a web-based philological annotation tool that
will be transformed into a collaboratory for the
history of science and the humanities in general.
It serves three purposes: (a) providing scholarly
access to the letters; (b) allowing researchers
to enrich existing datasets and annotate the
letters; (c) using the letters and the input of

2
researchers to visualise patterns meaningful for
the circulation of knowledge.
2.2. Use of other datasets
We will incorporate a particular database
of (meta)data, the
Catalogus Epistularum
Neerlandaricum
(CEN), or the Catalogue of
letters in Dutch repositories. It is a relatively
old database, already available via Telnet in the
early 1990s, before the world wide web came
into being.
CEN is an exhaustive database of letters in the
collections of five Dutch university libraries,
the Royal Library, and four other important
libraries. It contains more than 265,000
descriptions of approximately 1,000,000 letters,
dating from 1600 until the present day (of which
ca. 100,000 from the 17
th
century). It supplies
the following metadata: sender, recipient, place
of sending, year, language, repository and shelf
mark.
The format in which this database will be made
available to the project is to be negotiated with
the owner, OCLC.
3
Usage of this database will enable us to make
assertions about the fraction of the selected
letters with respect to the total body of letters.
Moreover, it allows us to increase the density
of the networks we are interested in, leading to
unprecedented research opportunities.
2.3. Language technology
In order to find meaningful patterns in social
networks of scholars and in circulation of
knowledge language technology is needed. For
this, CKCC is cooperating with CLARIN.
4
The mission of CLARIN is to make
language technology interoperable and to
make linguistic resources accessible on a
European infrastructure, so that all the arts
and humanities can make use of it. The
Netherlands pillar of CLARIN, CLARIN-NL,
5
has already obtained funding for constructing
such infrastructure, and has issued a call
for proposals for adding existing resources to
this infrastructure and writing demonstrator
services. Aided by expertise provided by
CLARIN members, in particular by the
University of Lancaster,
6
CKCC is developing
such a demonstrator. A proposal to this
end has been accepted by CLARIN-NL. The
demonstrator, comprising the correspondences
of Grotius, Const. Huygens and Descartes (ca.
15,000 letters in all), is planned to be completed
by October 2010. It will perform a time-
sensitive keyword extraction, which can be
visualised by means of a dynamic word cloud.
As the source languages are 17
th
century Dutch,
French and Latin, one needs at least spelling
normalisation and harmonisation of keywords
across languages.
2.4. Interpretation and Enrichment
References to people, places and times are often
implicit and can only be retrieved by studying
contextual material or by using secondary
sources. Named Entity Recognisers are helpful,
but it is not possible to rely on technology alone.
In order to get an accurate picture in sufficient
resolution, interplay between manual work and
automatic tools is needed. The collaboratory
based on e-Laborate gives researchers the
opportunity to collect their interpretations of
the texts, compare them to others and to
annotate them with their insights. Over time,
the results of this hand/mind work might
be automatically gathered and incorporated in
enriched transcriptions of the texts.
2.5. Visualisation
By offering meaningful visualizations of the
data, the CKCC will enable humanities
researchers in a wider context to use the
tools and the results yielded. Not only the
relationships between corresponding authors
will be made visible in time and space, but
CKCC also aims at visualizing the dynamics
of knowledge production by focusing on the
emergence of themes in scholarly debates
and social networks of 17
th
century natural
philosophers.
The dynamic word clouds based on keyword
extraction is just a first step. CKCC will
subsequently explore several approaches of
gathering and visualising meaningful patterns,
which are deliberately different in nature. The
first approach (a) is a sophistication of keyword
extraction, and the second one (b) is based on
associations in text. Both methods can be used
to evaluate the results of each other.