Searching 'Ancient' Wisdom Using New Tools: The Challenges of Integrating Multilinguistic, Interdisciplinary Data in the VERITRACE project
Creators: name: Wolf, Jeffrey Charles
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Digital humanities
subject: History of science

description: I will present early work-in-progress for the ERC StarNng Grant project ‘VERITRACE’ or “Traces de la verité: The reappropriaNon of ancient wisdom in early modern natural philosophy” (2023-2028). Based at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and led by Professor Cornelis J. Schilt, VERITRACE anNcipates significant breakthroughs in our understanding of the role of ancient wisdom in the development of early modern natural philosophy by using state-of-the-art digital techniques to analyse a large corpus of early modern texts. Because the VERITRACE corpus spans different data sets and insNtuNons, it requires us to break down silos, span disciplines, and advance the integraNon of previously created data.

But first, the intellectual background: during the Italian Renaissance, the idea that true knowledge was not new but ancient was quite influenNal, fuelled by the rediscovery of texts like the Corpus Herme=cum, the Chaldean Oracles, the Orphic Hymns, and the Sibylline Oracles, all understood to have been composed in anNquity. These texts, and the associated idea of knowledge as old, were reappropriated into a perennial philosophy, a prisca sapien=a, which was a tradiNon that valued these works for their insights into God, mankind, and the cosmos (Schmi<, 1966; Walker, 1972; Garin, 1984; Schmidt-Biggemann, 2004; Leinkauf, 2017). Key figures in early modern science, such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Gokried Wilhelm Leibniz, ascribed to this tradiNon in one form or another. Yet no comprehensive account exists of exactly what these luminaries took from these ancient wisdom wriNngs and how the concept of a perennial truth influenced their knowledge-making. VERITRACE focusses on the widespread disseminaNon and impact of the ancient wisdom tradiNon, employing specialized digital techniques adapted for early modern studies.

The VERITRACE project integrates close and distant reading of Renaissance and early modern texts. We do this by creaNng, and analysing, both a Close Reading Corpus (CRC) which includes all the relevant ediNons of the four main corpora under scruNny that were published during the Renaissance and early modern period but also works that drew heavily on these ancient wisdom wriNngs – and a Distant Reading Corpus (DRC). The Distant Reading method, closely related to natural language processing, allows for the analysis of large text corpora, idenNfying pa<erns and uncovering both prominent and neglected works, the la<er termed 'the great unread' by Margaret Cohen (Cohen, 2009; Reid, 2019). The DRC consists of several hundred thousand works from important European digital text databases in LaNn, French, German, Dutch, English and Italian, including:

• Early English Books Online (EEBO) (ProQuest), which in its EEBO-TCP format developed by the Text CreaNon Partnership, contains about 58,000 English and LaNn texts published between 1540 and 1700 (For exemplary uses of this resource, see, e.g. Pizelo et al., 2023; h<ps://earlyprint.org)

• Gallica (Bibliothèque naNonale de France) contains almost 125,000 books published between 1540 and 1728 in a variety of languages including French, Italian, Dutch, and LaNn

• The Digitale Sammlungen of the Bavarian State Library, which contain nearly 365,000 Ntles published between 1540 and 1728, in LaNn, German, and French, among others

Significant advancements in digiNsing early modern books have expanded the applicaNon of distant reading techniques. Improved OCR technology now yields meaningful results even with subopNmal text recogniNon (Hill and Hengchen, 2019; Kurhekar et al., 2021, Sangiacomo et al., 2022). Online repositories, like those of the Bibliothèque naNonale de France, provide standardised data for content extracNon, facilitaNng large-scale analysis (Imai, 2018; Karsdorp et al., 2021).

It is clear, then, that the primary data sources for the VERITRACE project are large, diverse data sources, containing mulNple languages, created in specific contexts, and stored in separate insNtuNons. The iniNal challenge for VERITRACE then is not only how to access this data but to integrate and clean it in a transparent, defensible way.

This Short Paper presentaNon will discuss how we have been able to access and combine our primary data sources in a manageable way, as well as point out some of the many obvious and more subtle – challenges that working with such data present.

As an example of innovate data reuse, I will show how we are repurposing the data from the Universal Short Title Catalogue (h<ps://www.ustc.ac.uk) to enrich and cross-reference the disparate metadata we have obtained from the primary collecNons that underpin our DRC corpus. We are therefore reusing data from another project at a separate insNtuNon (University of St. Andrews in Scotland) to enhance our data pipeline, which will make our subsequent analyses more robust. By using the USTC, we will be spanning disciplines, combining the history of science and knowledge-making with book history and bibliographical studies.

To enable the enNre VERITRACE team to make sense of the data, I will show how we use OpenRefine to provide a more accessible way of connecNng our raw data to the enriched metadata from the Universal Short Title Catalogue.