RAPID: Digging Into the Enlightenment: Mapping the Republic of Letters

“文人共和国”--一个在大约1500-1800年间用来描述学术团体和知识网络的术语--被描述为一块失落的大陆，一个没有国界的国家。它沉浸在贸易、外交和传教网络中，出现在印刷机的最初几十年，在创建学术团体和学术期刊的时代取得了丰硕成果，当学术生活的全面专业化和现代民族国家的崛起使这种跨国学术乌托邦成为过去的梦想时，它衰落了。文献共和国以个人、机构和项目为中心组织起来，是早期知识传播的主要方式。虽然它的起源是英国和欧洲，但文盲共和国经历了欧洲人旅行、殖民和定居的地方，包括殖民地美洲。《文人共和国》在时间和空间上表现出广泛的相关性，因此，在很大程度上，它可以被视为跨越数百年的时期内基于原则、沟通方法和哲学理想的个人松散联系。在另一个极端，它表现在密切相关的个人集群中，他们直接通过通信、沙龙或间接通过出版物和中间人分享想法。在每一种情况下，都有许多条件和限制影响网络进程，包括语言、地点、社交圈、政治事件、阴谋、宗教信仰和性别。这些数据中的大部分已被捕获，将使我们能够绘制网络的物理和虚拟拓扑。结合地理数据、历史事件和社会数据的影响，这是一个很好的案例研究，研究了全球范围内的思想传播如何与在地方范围内运行的动态过程有关。Christopher Weaver博士和他的同事将创造技术来可视化和分析从历史文本文档中提取的多维、多尺度和不确定的异质数据。此外，他们将开发互动设计，使个人和合作的学者能够剖析、重新访问、分享、探索和分析这些过去的知识网络。新的可视化方法将与现有技术相结合，以创建可利用和实用的工具，直接整合和应用于社会科学和人文科学学者正在进行的关于文献共和国的研究。该项目将为计算机科学、社会科学和人文科学做出贡献。对计算机科学的贡献包括支持开放式数据探索和分析方法的数据可视化和交互技术。对社会科学和人文科学的贡献将包括通过探索从书信、出版物和旅行记录中收集的经验数据，结合地理学家、历史学家和文学学者的解释专业知识来阐明文献共和国。

The "Republic of Letters" - a term used between ca. 1500-1800 to describe scholarly communities and networks of knowledge - has been described as a lost continent, a country without borders. Enmeshed in trading, diplomatic, and missionary networks, it emerged in the early decades of the printing press, came to full fruition in the era which created learned societies and scholarly journals, and declined when the full-scale professionalization of scholarly life and the rise of the modern nation-state made this transnational scholarly utopia a dream of the past. Organized around individuals, institutions, and projects, the Republic of Letters was the primary means by which knowledge traveled in this earlier era. While its origins were British and European, the Republic of Letters traveled where Europeans traveled, colonized, and settled, including the colonial Americas. The Republic of Letters expresses a wide range of correlations over time and space such that, on a large scale, it can be viewed as a loose affiliation of individuals based on principles, methods of communication, and philosophical ideals over a period spanning hundreds of years. At the other extreme, it is expressed in closely affiliated clusters of individuals sharing ideas either directly in correspondence, in salons, or indirectly through publications and via intermediaries. In every case, there are many conditions and constraints influencing network processes including language, location, social circles, political events, intrigue, religious affiliation, and gender. Much of this data has been captured and will allow us to map the physical and virtual topology of the network. Combining the implications of geographic data, historical events, and social data, this is an excellent case study for how the spread of ideas at the global scale relates to the dynamical processes that operate at the local scale. Dr. Christopher Weaver and colleagues will create techniques to visualize and analyze multi-dimensional, multi-scale, and uncertain heterogeneous data extracted from historical text documents. Further, they will develop interactive designs that enable individual and collaborating scholars to dissect, revisit, share, explore, and analyze these past networks of knowledge. The new visualization methods will be combined with existing techniques to create accessible and functional tools for direct integration in and application to the ongoing study of the Republic of Letters by social science and humanities scholars. This project will contribute to computer science, social sciences, and the humanities. The contributions to computer science include data visualization and interaction techniques in support of open-ended data exploration and analysis methodologies. The contributions to the social sciences and humanities will include elucidation of the Republic of Letters through an exploration of empirical data gleaned from correspondences, publications, and travel records, combined with the interpretive expertise of geographers, historians, and literary scholars.