The ePistolarium: Origins and Techniques
Walter Ravenek, Charles van den Heuvel, G.H. Gerritsen, Odijk, J, van Hessen, A · Ubiquity Press eBooks · 2017
The Circulation of Knowledge: A Web-based Humanities’ Collaboratory on Correspondences and Learned Practices in the 17th-century Dutch Republic (CKCC) project was an NWO project aimed at developing an infrastructure for researchers. Its main goal was to gain insight into the Dutch share of the circulation of knowledge in the 17th-century ’Republic of Letters’ by means of analysis and visualisation tools. A database of 20,000 letters in TEI-format offered the possibility to falsify hypotheses that were often based on extrapolations from limited numbers of letters. The complexity of this collection of data – caused by the presence of multilingual letters, often with several languages within a letter, extensive spelling variation, and early modern language variants – was a challenge for the researchers and IT specialists. With the support of CLARIN-NL and the EU, however, we were able to overcome these linguistic problems.