Athanasius Kircher Correspondence metadata (EMLO)

From GATE
Revision as of 14:32, 11 February 2020 by ArchivesPUG (talk | contribs)

In this page it's possible to query some metadata of the Athanasius Kircher Correspondence, including all the letters not yet uploaded and transcribed on GATE. This is possible thanks to the collaboration with the project Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO), that has kindly made available to us its data. At this purpose we are particularly grateful to Howard Hotson (director of the project Cultures of knowledge), Miranda Lewis (main editor of EMLO) and Iva Lelková (curator of the Athanasius Kircher Correspondence project on EMLO).

Metadata search guide

Before using this tool, it's important to keep in mind some information:

  • EMLO and GATE are two different projects, with different aims and they also use different technologies, so here we don't want to duplicate the contents already available on EMLO
  • for the same reason, in the following table there are only few of the dozens of metadata and information that are instead available on EMLO
  • to avoid duplication of sources, we decided to show here just very basic metadata: date of the letter, sender, recipient, language, link to the available transcription on GATE and link to the EMLO record, where users can acquire more information about the same letter and, most of all, browse the data that connect Kircher correspondence with other projects available on EMLO.

Some tips about the table

The metadata can be browsed and queried through a DataTable, a powerful tool that allows to search inside the table and filter the results while typing. This process could be expensive in terms of memory requested to your computer, so if you can't visualize the data in this page, you can look at them in a lighter visualization available at this link.
As always happens with large correspondences, also the Kircher's one contains letters with missing information such as dates (as a whole or part of them), people involved in the epistolary exchange and place of origin and destination of the letter. About the places, they are excluded from this table, so if you are interested in doing researches about them we suggest to use EMLO database. Dates are recorded for most of the letters, anyway:

  • when it's completely missing, dates are automatically recorded as 31 December 9999
  • when only the year is missing you'll find the correct day and month and as year 9999, e.g. 20 March 9999 or 15 July 9999 etc.

The table shows the letters according to an ascending chronological order, anyway it's possible to rearrange the data using the arrows within the header row.