Data Table - Digital Scholarship, PhD project "Bridging Data Science and Intellectual History: Computing the Nodes and Edges in the Old University of Louvain (1425-1797)"

How were academic networks configured in the premodern world, and how did they change? This doctoral project seeks to offer a data-driven answer by computing networks at and around the Old University of Louvain (1425-1797), a crucial hub for the transfer of knowledge in late medieval and early modern Europe. Drawing upon datasets under construction from the teams of the PIs at KU Leuven and UCLouvain, this project sets out to plot and visualize networks of students, scholars and their ‘books’ over almost four centuries, thus integrating data from demographic, prosopographical and book historical datasets. This will lead to a better understanding of how academic communities evolved in the past, and it will help to assess how their organization and structure promoted or hindered the creation and transfer of knowledge in premodern Europe. Hence, the doctoral research project offers an innovative test case to develop novel understandings of networks (e.g.. new tested ways to define nodes and edges) in datasets on scholars and ‘literati’, and it will be able to compare these new results to interpretations of human capital indices in the past. As such, the project creates a pioneering pilot for integrating data science into the field of intellectual and early modern history. This enhanced collaboration between KU Leuven and UCLouvain on a theme related to their common past is timely in view of 600 years Leuven/Louvain in 2025.