Digital Humanities: Mellon Funds Phase III of Cultures of Knowledge Project (Early Modern Letters Online) With $744,000 Grant

From a Cultures of Knowledge Blog Post:

This grant [by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation] of $744,000 will take Early Modern Letters Online [EMLO] through another two years of development, from April 2015 to March 2017. We are deeply grateful to the Foundation — and to all our partners, contributors, and team members — for their invaluable support and continued confidence in the significance of this rapidly growing project.
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The ultimate aspiration of the project is now to create a platform for radically multilateral scholarly collaboration — a ‘scholarly social machine’ — which can furnish an entire community of scholars and repositories with the means of piecing back together the millions of scholarly letters scattered across and beyond a continent during the early modern period. Once developed for such a purpose, this technology can be applied to earlier and later periods, and to the documentation of other forms of learned exchange, while the workflows and cultures created can be repurposed to bring other communities of expertise to bear on analogous problems.
In pursuing these ambitious goals, the further development of EMLO will be informed by discussions coordinated by the new COST-funded, pan-European network, ‘Reassembling the Republic of Letters, 1500–1800’, chaired by CofK’s Director, Professor Howard Hotson, from April 2014 to April 2018.

Much More in the Complete Blog Post
Direct to EMLO Search Interface
About the Project
From the COK Web Site:

Correspondence was the information superhighway of the early modern world. Between 1550 and 1750, regular exchanges of letters encouraged the formation of virtual communities of people with shared interests in various kinds of knowledge which stretched across the globe. Classical scholars, philologists, antiquaries, patristic scholars, orientalists, theologians, astronomers, botanists, experimental natural philosophers, intelligencers, ‘free-thinkers’, and many other denizens of the Republic of Letters: all cultivated and sustained their professional, social, intellectual, and cultural lives in and through epistolary systems.
Since 2009, the Cultures of Knowledge project, based at the University of Oxford with the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been using a variety of research methods to reassemble and understand these networks.

Filed under: Funding, Open Access, Public Libraries