ePistolarium (Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-century Dutch Republic)

The scientific revolution of the 17th century was driven by countless discoveries in the workshop, in the observatory and in society at large.

A dramatic increase in the amount of information gave rise to new knowledge. But how were new elements of knowledge disseminated and appropriated? In short: how did knowledge circulate?

In order to answer this question the CKCC project built a web application called ePistolarium. With this application researchers can browse and analyze around 20,000 letters that were written by and sent to 17th century scholars who lived in the Dutch Republic. Moreover, the ePistolarium enables visualizations of geographical, time-based, social network and co-citation inquiries.