From the Quadrivium to Modern Science

The ultimate objective of this work is to demonstrate that it is possible to reconsider the emergence of modern science as a process of disintegration of the quadrivium, which was considered a stable scheme for the organization of knowledge. The argument considers the quadrivium according to the Boethian systematization that was used to organize the curricula of the late medieval universities. This argument follows the development of each of its disciplines and illustrates the practical turn they underwent. The period between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries is explored, and shows that during this period, the quadrivium potentially included a fifth autonomous discipline, calendric. The article concludes by describing epistemological considerations to the mechanisms of disintegration of knowledge structures

Digital Perspectives in History

This article outlines the state of digital perspectives in historical research, some of the methods and tools in use by digital historians, and the possible or even necessary steps in the future development of the digital approach. We begin by describing three main computational approaches: digital databases and repositories, network analysis, and Machine Learning. We also address data models and ontologies in the larger context of the demand for sustainability and linked research data. The section is followed by a discussion of the (much needed) standards and policies concerning data quality and transparency. We conclude with a consideration of future scenarios and challenges for computational research

Printers, Publishers, and Sellers: Actors in the Process of Consolidation of Epistemic Communities in the Early Modern Academic World

This chapter proposes a global view of the set of dynamics of interplay that were generated in the early modern publishing sector around a single astro-nomical work, the Tractatus de sphaera by Johannes de Sacrobosco. The Sphaera, a thirteenth-century tract of geocentric cosmology, rather than remaining a static text, became over the centuries a multiauthored dynamic textual tradition. This essay argues that publishers, printers, and booksellers had a fair share of agency not only in perpetuating but also in shaping the evolution of this long-lasting textual tradition. The present essay traces the ways this agency was configured

Paratexts, Printers, and Publishers: Book Production in Social Context

Paratexts, such as dedication letters or epigrams, in early modern printed books can be used by historians to situate a book’s production in its institutional and social context. We depart from the general assumption that two publishers or printers were in a relation of awareness of each other if they printed and put on the market two different editions that contain at least one identical paratext. In this paper, we analyze the circulation of the paratexts among the 359 editions of the “Sphaera corpus.” First, we discuss the available data, the conditions to build a social network, and the latter’s characteristics. Second, we interpret the results—potential relationships among printers and publishers—from a historical point of view and, at the same time, discuss the sorts of potential relationships that this method can disclose. Third, we corroborate the historical results among different approaches, namely by using editions’ fingerprints and by investigating the book production of those printers and publishers tangentially involved in relevant relationships, but who fall outside the “Sphaera corpus.” Finally, we identify local communities of printers and publishers and, on a transregional level, printers, and publishers who were observing and influencing each other

CIDOC2VEC: Extracting Information from Atomized CIDOC-CRM Humanities Knowledge Graphs

The development of the field of digital humanities in recent years has led to the increased use of knowledge graphs within the community. Many digital humanities projects tend to model their data based on CIDOC-CRM ontology, which offers a wide array of classes appropriate for storing humanities and cultural heritage data. The CIDOC-CRM ontology model leads to a knowledge graph structure in which many entities are often linked to each other through chains of relations, which means that relevant information often lies many hops away from their entities. In this paper, we present a method based on graph walks and text processing to extract entity information and provide semantically relevant embeddings. In the process, we were able to generate similarity recommendations as well as explore their underlying data structure. This approach was then demonstrated on the Sphaera Dataset which was modeled according to the CIDOC-CRM data structure