The knowledge map for the early modern period: from the virtual library to the virtual encyclopaedia

As part of eAQUA, the Heidelberg projects CAMENA and TERMINI offer materials and tools for setting up a virtual encyclopaedia covering the early modern period. EVRECA is an experiment, rather than a finished product. It is oriented on needs and questions that we believe have to date not received sufficient attention in modern printed lexical works on the period. It is based on our experience with early modern text corpora now held in electronic form and uses the possibilities of computer-aided data analysis that are available to us.

This has resulted in an accumulative index of lexical data from several works of the THESAURUS ERUDITIONIS (LEMMATA) and also, in co-operation with the Department of Natural Language Processing in the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Leipzig, in an analysis of co-occurrences in early modern text corpora (CAMENA) and the classical Latin texts of the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI).

These two tools are combined here in a workbench to give our visitors easy access (see access via the alphabet in the column on the left). The two tools work independently of each other. They complement each other and the results they produce can and should be subjected to a critical comparison. We have included an extra, third tool in the form of an Internet search engine.

Please note: Users must not expect the results offered to be necessarily complete and error-free!

We had only modest resources at our disposal for developing EVRECA. The project would not have been realised without the support of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and assistance from the text-mining specialists at the University of Leipzig.

Please refer to our notes, especially when formulating search terms independently of our proposed LEMMATA.

Introductory literature:

Reinhard Gruhl: Das Wissensnetz der Frühen Neuzeit. Von der virtuellen Bibliothek zur virtuellen Enzyklopädie. In: Ch. Schubert, G. Heyer (Hgg.): Das Portal eAQUA - Neue Methoden in der geisteswissenschaftlichen Forschung I (Working Papers Contested Order No.1). Leipzig 2010, S. 56-70. (Online-Veröffentlichung ISSN 2191-3641).

Last modified July 7, 2011