On the Use of the Digital Source Anthology

KRÁSZ, Lilla

ON THE USE OF THE DIGITAL SOURCE ANTHOLOGY

In the framework of our research project entitled The Patterns of the Circulation of Scientific Knowledge in the Kingdom of Hungary, 1770–1830, we have investigated how and through which personal, institutional, and medial channels the scientific disciplines were formed from different types and characters of knowledge by building on the example of seven fields (history; classical philology – aesthetics; the history of philosophy; state sciences – statistics; ethnology – anthropology; medicine; economics – agricultural sciences). The academic discipline, which emerged across Europe at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is a new scheme that presupposes in a given network of learned people/scholars – the republic of letters (respublica litteraria) – common questions and ideological foundations, common (specialist) language codes, independent publishing activities capable of representing a given field, and, in an institutionalized form, independent professorships at universities, methodologies, textbooks, and specialist journals. The fields of knowledge under study are defined by the narrative of the Wissenschaft vom Menschen (“sciences of man”), which originates in Göttingen . The narrative appeared to be suitable for capturing a tradition in the history of science that could be interpreted as the “anthropological turn”, marking a spectacular change through which “man as a secularized, naturalized, and historicized being” and man’s life-worlds, spaces of action, and their structures were gradually organized into a new system. The disciplinarisation of the seven fields of knowledge we have examined in the Hungarian context was fundamentally determined by the European processes of knowledge transfer of varying intensity and width. External influences, mainly from Göttingen and other educational centres in Vienna, Germany, and England, and from alternative scientific communities and their internal adaptation processes, conforming to the social, political, ethnic, and religious conditions of contemporary Hungary, contributed significantly to the reorganisation that took place in the world of science.

The timeframe of the research was also defined along these premises: the organisation of the University of Nagyszombat (Trnava, today in Slovakia), later moved to Buda and then Pest, was completed in 1770 with the establishment of the Faculty of Medicine; the first Hungarian scientific journals were published in the first decades of the nineteenth century; and the scientific sections of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences were established by 1830. Although the period between the last third of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth centuries is regarded by most historians as a period of the late Enlightenment characterised by a closed philosophical system and as the beginning of modernity, it has become clear in the course of our research that it is more appropriate to interpret this period in many respects as a process, a transition between paradigms , during which new discourse communities, new identities, new manners of speech, and new epistemic patterns driven by curiosity emerged.

The general aim of the project, by focusing on the seven fields of knowledge, was to get closer to answering the questions of where, what, how, and who read, took notes, wrote, compiled, and collected information, what the knowledge thus gathered was used for, and to whom and by what means it was transmitted. The results of our research, with visual illustrations, are published in a comprehensive volume , synthesised in a four-tier system of 1) the profiles of scholars as actors, 2) epistemic arenas, 3) the practices of the “making” of knowledge and scholarship (Wissen-schaffen) 4) and the media of the production and transmission of knowledge.

The present anthology, which comprises several, previously unknown, primarily manuscript sources and to a lesser extent printed sources in Hungarian, Latin, and German, was compiled by keeping the above-listed four aspects in mind. The sources published here, such as academic treatises/commentaries, university lecture notes, travel instructions, travelogues, reports, and ego-documents (funeral orations, wills) belong to various genres and were written for different audiences. The texts reveal the contemporary manners of speech and writing, their characteristic use of language and terminology, but also the development of the thought style (Denkstil), the development of practices related to the “making” of knowledge/science, and the changes in the focal points that determine the perception and observation of things and relations. The publication of the sources in a digital form makes it possible, in addition to the personal and spatial network of relationships the visualisation of which are common in similar projects, to make the patterns, internal events, and interrelationships of the process of disciplinarisation easily searchable, readable, and subsequently visible in the form of data visualisations with the help of a conceptual network – assumed to be plausible – consisting of certain main and sub-concepts. The categories of the conceptual network were constructed by assigning subcategories to a total of 19 period- and subject-specific main concepts, designated by the content, language, and conceptual character of a given text.

The main concepts and some examples of the subcategories:

1. 1.      STATE → forms of state, political boundaries, state description, sovereign, forms of government, …
2. 2.      HUMAN RESOURCES → religion, lifestyle, education, population density, epidemics, endemic diseases, instincts, the purpose of man, …
3. 3.      INSTRUMENTS→ experimental electronic instrument, measuring tools, mill, threshing machine, …
4. 4.      POWER → laws, monarch, division of power, leading elite, the division of lands, …
5. 5.      EXPERIENCES OF OTHERNESS → demonizing, comparison, images of the enemy, assimilation, relationship with neighbouring peoples, …
6. 6.      GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION → government officials, limitation of power, gubernatorial authorities, magistrate, royal privileges and powers, …
7. 7.      CULTURAL LANDSCAPE→ harbour, house/hut, buildings, garden, living environment, urbanity, …
8. 8.      PUBLIC POLICY (POLIZEY) → medical statistics, the use of medical services, …
9. 9.      REPUBLIC OF LETTERS → peregrination, learned society, botanical garden, university collections, anatomical theatre, library, …
10. 10.  RITES → cannibalism, the experience of emotions, exclusion, sacraments, mysteries, …
11. 11.  GENDER → female religiosity, the mutilation of male and female bodies, external features, gendered activities and prohibitions, …
12. 12.  SOCIETY → sociability, social stratification, the promotion of the common good, the service of the community, the social relations of man, …
13. 13.  TECHNOLOGY → meadow cultivation, pasturing, animal husbandry, mineral processing, food production, toolmaking, …
14. 14.  NATURE CONCEPT → cultural climate theory, cultural geography, climatic conditions, …
15. 15.  NATURAL RESOURCES → mineral, field and meadow, arable land, …
16. 16.  BODY CONCEPT → symptoms, the general course of diseases, the turning points of diseases, forms of therapy, …
17. 17.  THE USE OF THE BODY → the adornment of the body, tattooing, grooming, head- and hairstyling, …
18. 18.  HISTORICITY → the formation of humankind, statistics and history, the history of Europe, historical periods, the methodology of historical research, …
19. 19.  SCHOLARSHIP → ethnographic profile, the establishment of a department, political science curriculum, …

As outlined above, we have sought to create an open system that, on the one hand, allows for the multi-level reading of the published sources by genre, content, and the networks of personal, spatial, and conceptual relationships, and that is, on the other hand, vertically and horizontally extensible. We aim to continue this work by adding further texts to the genres already included in the system and by broadening the spectrum of genres in relation to the seven fields of knowledge. The DigiCirculation_of_Knowledge (DICIKO) platform is also suitable for the inclusion and display of further fields of knowledge (e.g., psychology, botany, chemistry, physics, mathematics, etc.). To introduce the platform to the Hungarian and international scientific community, we intend to use the online platforms of the scientific community and promote it at workshops, so that we could expand the network of colleagues open to publishing sources related to the history of science of turn the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The texts are published following the general archaeographic rules of the given language. The Hungarian, Latin, and German texts have been transcribed to the letter. Three dots in square brackets […] within a text indicate that the word or part of the text is illegible. Where the text is crossed out, underlined, superscripted, or written by another hand, it is indicated in a footnote. Any subsequent additions (e.g., the removal of abbreviations) are enclosed in square brackets.

The most important information about the technical background of our digital platform and the construction of the database is provided in Section II below, while in Section III a map of concepts related to the seven fields assists the reader.