Normalisation of Early Modern Science: Digitized Corpus of 17th- and 18th-Century Sources

This dataset contains a digitized corpus of early modern natural philosophy works that underlie the European Research Commission-funded Starting Grant “The Normalisation of Natural Philosophy: How Teaching Practices Shaped the Evolution of Early Modern Science,” (grant agreement No. 801653 NaturalPhilosophy), led by Dr. Andrea Sangiacomo at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Groningen.

The methodology we used for the digitization of the present dataset is described in the paper:

A. Sangiacomo, H. Hogenbirk, R. Tanasescu, A. Karaisl, N White. 2022. “Reading in the Mist: High-Quality Optical Character Recognition Based on Early Modern Digitized Books.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. https://bit.ly/3vwvwKI

The inventory of the present dataset is available at DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5566681

The methodology behind the retrieval, cleaning, and annotation of the above inventory is described in the paper:

Sangiacomo, Andrea; Tanasescu, Raluca; Donker, Silvia; Hogenbirk, Hugo. 2021. “Mapping the Evolution of Early Modern Natural Philosophy: Corpus Collection and Authority Acknowledgement,” published in the Annals of Science (DOI: 10.1080/00033790.2021.1992502; permanent link: https://doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2021.1992502

The dictionaries from which we selected the data in worksheets 2-5 in the inventory are the following:

Wiep van Bunge, Henri Krop, Bart Leeuwenburgh, Paul Schuurman, Han van Ruler and Michiel Wielema, Dictionary of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch Philosophers (London: Bloomsbury, 2003);

John Yolton, Valdimir Price and John Stephens. Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers (London: Bloomsbury, 1999);

Andrew Pyle. Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century British Philosophers (London: Bloomsbury, 2000);

Luc Foisneau. Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century French Philosophers (London: Bloomsbury, 2008);

Heiner F. Klemme and Manfred Kuehn. Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).

University of Groningen Team:

Andrea Sangiacomo (principal investigator)

Raluca Tanasescu (postdoctoral researcher)

Silvia Donker and Hugo Hogenbirk (PhD students)

Cristian A. Marocico (scientific programmer, Center for Information Technology)

Wim Breakman (bibliographer, University of Groningen Library)