News: Release project website and test version Circulation of Knowledge – Research Environment

7 september 2012

The project ‘Circulation of knowledge and learned practices in the 17th century Dutch Republic’ (CKCC) is pleased to announce the new website with a test version of the virtual research environment (CKCC VRE), containing the spectacular amount of 20.000 Dutch scholarly letters from the period 1594-1707.

In order to answer the question how did knowledge circulate in the 17th century, the CKCC project built a virtual research environment containing 20.000 scholarly letters from the period 1594-1707, enriched with some smart tools for searching and analysis. With this application researchers can browse and analyze metadata and full texts of the letters of Caspar van Baarle (Barlaeus); Isaac Beeckman; René Descartes; Hugo de Groot (Grotius); Christiaan Huygens; Constantijn Huygens; Antoni van Leeuwenhoek; Dirck Rembrantsz van Nierop; and Jan Swammerdam. It is also possible to visualize social networks and co-citation inquiries.

The application will be officially launched and made available for the public in February 2013, but the project website contains a link and supporting documentation for a closed beta of the VRE. The CKCC project would like to invite you to try out this first test version in order to improve the functionality and usability, and to develop test cases. Please contact Charles van den Heuvel for more information and an inlog.

Participants in the the CKCC project are: Descartes Institute (University of Utrecht); the Huygens ING; National Library of the Netherlands; DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services) and UvA (University of Amsterdam).