Workshop organised in collaboration with the ERC Project NOTCOM.

Convenors: Goran Gaber (European University Institute/MFO), Mouhamadoul Khaly Wélé (IHRIM, ENS Lyon/ NOTCOM)

Digitising historical sources and tools for their analysis is transforming how we think about and practice intellectual history. Much like the introduction of print profoundly altered the intellectual landscape of early modernity, the contemporary constitution of digital editions offers new insights, but also requires new practical skills and unprecedented expert collaboration.

The effects of digital historical scholarship on the practice of early modern intellectual history take several forms. First, by digitising corpora, it facilitates access to the historiographical canon, but also broadens and transforms this canon itself. Second, the parallel development of digital tools for analysing the corpora reveals new features of the studied texts and previously overlooked connections between them. Finally, these significant shifts allow us to revisit a series of theoretical, epistemological and practical questions concerning the nature of our historiographical resources, the modes and models governing our production of historical knowledge, and the social aims of historiography itself.

To discuss these issues, channels of Digital Scholarship is delighted to welcome five speakers from the Taylor Institution Library (Oxford), the Bodleian Library (Oxford), and the research centre IHRIM (CNRS UMR 5317) at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, who will present their work and explore the possibilities digital scholarship offers for intellectual history in general and for that of early modernity in particular.