Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the Digital Age: Standards, Systems, Scholarship

0517942 - FLÚ 2020 RIV DE eng M - Monography Chapter
Urbánek, Vladimír
Individual Itineraries.
Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the Digital Age: Standards, Systems, Scholarship. Göttingen: Göttingen University Press, 2019 - (Hotson, H.; Wallnig, T.), s. 325-332. ISBN 978-3-86395-403-1
Grant - others:COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology)(BE) COST Action IS1310
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : J. A. Comenius * mobility * correspondence networks * itinerary * matrix-map model * visualization
OECD category: History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)

The study deals with a problem of how to visualize complex data related to correspondence network of Jan Amos Comenius and its changes in time. The general objective was to develop a means of visualizing the data defining both the itinerary and the correspondence of Comenius in a manner that allowed the relationship between them to be explored and more perfectly understood. Are changes in geographical scope and prosopographical composition closely related to the person’s physical movements or independent of them? More specifically, the aim was to develop a means of discovering whether one drives the other. An interactive ‘matrix-map model’ was adopted as a tool of visualizing the two data sets, one emphasizing the spatial dimension, the other the temporal one. This tool helps formulate and solve questions regarding the frequency of correspondence contacts in certain periods in relationship to a region or city where Comenius was, and its accessibility and connectedness. It also helps model to what extent Comenius’s personal, face-to-face contacts generated or intensified correspondences that are long-lasting. The matrix-map model can be tested on other data sets, for example, those of other highly mobile scholars in the period of the Thirty Years’ War.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0303451