Topic: the antiquarian tradition

Project: an international research network - digitally enabled

Up to the nineteenth century antiquarians were in the forefront of the study and reception of the past. They dealt in ruins and remains; they made collections, whether of art, coins, or of everyday phenomena; they brought coherent system to the material remains of the past. The antiquarian tradition in Europe was at the heart of enlightenment debates about the rational study of the past. Antiquarian publication pioneered mapmaking and the illustrated book. The antiquarian tradition is a global phenomenon; we are beginning to appreciate common cultural features in the treatment of the material past. Yet antiquarianism is now most often seen as a predisciplinary field, superceded and outmoded by archaeology and historical geography, ethnology, museum studies and collection management, information science. It is also a neglected field of research.

This project aims to reevaluate the antiquarian tradition. We are particularly investigating the proposition that the antiquarian tradition in early modern Europe (roughly 1500-1820) has been misunderstood because of the difficulties of the multidisciplinary research required to understand such a field. More specifically, we aim to explore the hypothesis that the antiquarian tradition was not an intellectual backwater to the mainstream development of experimental science, but was a key component of predisciplinary scholarly scientific production.

An innovative environment for sharing research.

One. Published sources within the global antiquarian tradition will be gathered in the Bibliotheca Universalis Antiquaria (BUA) - a digital library of high resolution scans. The library is being built by separate groups of scholars coordinated by Michael Shanks of SHL and especially by Alain Schnapp in Paris. One is devoted to the French language tradition; another project in the US is another working on sources in English. The institutions directly and currently involved in this effort are Stanford University Libraries, Brown University Library, Cambridge University Library, INHA (Institut nationale d'histoire de l'Art), the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Wolfenbüttel Library in Germany.

Two. Collaborative Research Environment Access to the high res scans of books and sources in the BUA will be via collaborative participatory software. This will offer the following functions to users of the library: intelligent search, comment and annotate texts, author and edit pages, link, append, tag, organize pages and works in the collection. Such an environment is designed to facilitate the work of dispersed and diverse research networks as well as to augment the BUA with related primary and secondary materials, discussion forums and research publication.

Three. Case Studies exploring the antiquarian tradition in local and historical contexts. Using the digitally enabled research environment (One and Two above), these projects will address specific research questions. They will also question the coherence and definition of the antiquarian tradition, adding specific sources, published and unpublished, to the collection (eg imagery, related important works, unpublished correspondence and papers). The research environment and projects will thus provide an iterative and evolutionary dynamic to the definition of the antiquarian tradition: new research will inform the development and expansion of the collections of the BUA. I am particularly interested, for example, in antiquarian activity in the borders bewteen England and Scotland, up to and including the Scottish Enlightenment.

Four. Publication The project will deliver conventional academic publications, including two edited books on the antiquarian tradition, as well as publication arising from the case studies. There will also be two conferences to discuss the projects' findings. The Getty Foundation, for example, is supporting the project with a year of visiting scholars at the Getty Villa (2009-2010 coordinated by Schnapp), a conference and a book.