Description
For over three centuries (1500-1800), European scholars saw themselves as part of an imagined community to which they referred to as the Respublica Literaria. Through networks of letters written primarily in Latin, learned men and women shared information about work-in-progress and recently published books, reflected on the politics of churches and universities and reported on family matters and health problems. The digital turn taken by the humanities affords the unique opportunity to chart these correspondence networks in an unprecedented manner. However, reassembling the vast amount of letters available online is an extremely laborious process. In order to face this challenge, we, modern-day scholars from all over the world, just like the citizens of the Republic of Letters, need to work together. Crowdsourcing platforms offer a digital environment in which this collaboration finds its full expression. At the University of Utrecht, the crowdsourcing platform CEMROL, developed by the SKILLNET project, aims to harvest metadata from digitized editions of printed letter collections. The user of CEMROL is presented with two tasks. First, to visually isolate epistolary metadata recorded on the printed page: the names of sender and recipient, the date of the letter, the place it was sent from and addressed to. Second, to transcribe the metadata. Building on the information collected by our volunteers, we can then perform analyses and visualize these correspondence networks. This pitch will address the challenges of applying a network approach to crowdsourced data, in particular the extent to which the crowd is capable of changing Latin dates, Latin place names and Latinized proper names into standardized and authorized entities.| Period | 1 May 2020 |
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| Event title | IKOS Cultural Interactions in the Ancient World Annual Meeting : Networking the Ancient World |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Groningen, NetherlandsShow on map |