EASTWAYS OF SCIENCE · At the fringes of the Republic of Scientists: the East-West routes of scientific communication in Europe in the age of experiment (1650-1680)

At the fringes of the Republic of Scientists: the East-West routes of scientific communication in Europe in the age of experiment (1650-1680)

The project At the fringes of European "Republic of science": the east-west routes of scientific communication in the age of experiment (1650-1680 ca.) is co-financed by EC FP7 Marie Curie ERG Actions and by the Department of History, Culture and Religions of the Sapienza University of Rome. Eastways of Science (EoS) aims at constructing the prototype of a multitask data-base that takes into account evidence gathered from scientific correspondences so as to define and highlight the contents, the actors, the networks and the ways of transmission of cultural and scientific information in early modern Europe. As to time, it focuses on the second half of the 17th century, when the experimental "matter of facts", socially checked and shared by means of letters, became the foundation of the "new" science. As to space, it takes into account the area Rome - Florence - Paris - Danzig, with special respect to the Mitteleuropa area, that is the supposed "periphery" of the "Republic of Science". In order to achieve this aim, two blocks of sources have been selected: the letters from and to prince Leopoldo de' Medici (1657- 1667) in the National Library of Florence and the scientific epistolary by the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687) in the Ancient Library of Paris Observatory. The project has been carried out within the shared web environment Pinakes 3.0, realized by the Museo Galileo in Florence and managed by the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale in Florence. Pinakes 3.0 fits perfectly EoS philosophy of resource-sharing: It is a moldable, open source and free Web application which allows users to define and to manage semantic models for gathering and sharing information spread over different archives, databases and repositories, in observance of the copyright laws. In order to realize EoS project, we have been working on: 1. populating the existing common Pinakes web infrastructure by means of: * building a meaningful repository of letters (in digital version) * defining the letters' extrinsic information (sender, addressee, place of origin, place of destination, date); * defining the letters' internal information (people, books, instruments, manuscripts, maps, related letters, observations etc.); 2. establishing relations: * among found resources in order to be able to navigate across. Links have been established among letters reposing within Pinakes infrastructure but also with the related ones in other collections (on the web, on e-libraries, on paper); * among different kind of information, in order to be able to answer questions like: who did have in 1680 Hevelius' Selenographia and where? Expanding searches for ad hoc combined items could give them answers. EoS is a low-budget and a small-team project; the EC support gave it financial aid and a high reliability. It achieved results that are expected to have a deep impact on the community of the researchers. 1. It realized a form for cataloguing and classifying letters that is flexible, mouldable and easy to fit for other kind of historical researches. It has already been employed by the project North-South Communication(s) in Early Modern Europe (University of Mainz - University of Chieti). 2. The EoS data-base could be useful also to scientists. The form we realized and tested includes a field "observations" with its sub-fields "phenomenon", "place", "date", "instrument", "curator of experiment/observation", "witnesses". The data could give astronomers, volcanologists, medical researchers etc. plenty of information useful for statistics, i.e., of natural phenomena, diseases, extinctions etc. EoS data-base will be soon available on the following web-sites: http://pinakes.imss.fi.it - http://www.museogalileo.it/ - http://www.enbach.eu EoS contacts: scientific project managers: Prof. Renata AGO - Renata.Ago@Uniroma1.it Dr. Federica FAVINO - Federica.Favino@uniroma1.it software author and developer: Dr. Andrea Scotti - Pinakes Dev. Group - pinakes@imss.fi.it 1. By exploring libraries and archives looking for sources fitting EoS objectives, many unpublished documents relevant for the history of science have been found. They have been discussed in several publications come out in peer review journals, collective volumes and conference proceedings (see the list "Publications"). 2. The EoS team organized public conferences in order to disseminate its aims, methodologies and results and to meet other teams involved in Digital Heritage projects. We organized and coordinated the panel Scientific Correspondence at the 4th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, Barcelona, 18-20 November 2010 and the work-shop I[nformation] T[echnology] sharing: progetti a confronto, Rome, Department of History, Culture and Religion, 24th January 2011. 3. The EoS team, together with the Archive of the Pontificia Università Gregoriana, the University of Mainz and the University of Chieti, gave birth to the meta-project: North-South Communication(s) in Early Modern Europe (NosCom). It aims at realizing a digital integrated archive of different kind of sources (texts, images, multimedia...) which can shed new light on the circulation of knowledge between the Protestant North and the Catholic South of the Counter-reformation Europe. NosCom employs the research methodologies and the technology developed by Eastways of Science.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union