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Join us for brown-bag sessions on digital humanities, jointly hosted by Walker Library and the Association of Graduate Students in History. 

 

How to Read the Republic of Letters: Digital Network Analysis and the Correspondence of Athanasius Kircher (1633-1680)

 

with Dr. Suzanne Sutherland, History Department, MTSU

This presentation examines the uses and misuses of network analysis for traditional humanities research. Athanasius Kircher (1601/2-1680) was the most prominent Jesuit scholar of his day, occupying a key position at the crossroads of the global Jesuit missionary network and the European-wide Republic of Letters. He authored over thirty books on a polymathic array of subjects and his correspondence was large and diverse. This project is part of Stanford University’s interdisciplinary Mapping the Republic of Letters initiative. It uses the digital mapping tool, Palladio (http://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/), to investigate Kircher’s correspondence in order to shed new light on how early modern global information networks functioned. What insights do network analysis tools contribute to traditional humanities projects such as the analysis of letters? What kind of balance should one strike between the quantitative and the qualitative aspects of such research? What are the limitations of these tools? 

For more information about Digital Scholarship Initiatives, visit dsi.mtsu.edu

Date:
Friday, April 7, 2017
Time:
11:30am - 1:00pm
Location:
Meeting Place 4 -- Rm 462
Categories:
  Digital Scholarship Initiatives  
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