Sciences between Tradition and Innovation – workshop volume

On May 28–29, 2019, we organized a two-day workshop at the Faculty of Humanities of Eötvös Loránd University entitled Sciences between Tradition and Innovation – Historical Perspectives / Wissenschaften zwischen Tradition und Innovation – historische Perspektiven, where, besides the members of the research team, other historians of science, medicine, and literature from Hungary, Göttingen, and Vienna presented their results. Focusing on different fields of knowledge, the participants discussed the patterns of the formation of traditions in the sciences in the Sattelzeit (1770–1830), along with the complex processes of—from the contemporary perspective—novel methods of cognition and observation, the introduction and adaptation of new scientific content, and their socialization (Vergesellschaftung) through various media.

The workshop volume is available at this link: Sciences between Tradition and Innovation – Historical Perspectives

The Networks of Knowledge: the Circulation of Knowledge in Europe – Hungary’s Scientific Life, 1770–1830

The results of the project will be published in the form of a synthesis volume in Hungarian and English, as well as a digital source anthology closely related to the contributions. The volume, currently in manuscript form, ready for publication, explores the complex process of the development of the seven fields of knowledge into scientific disciplines within a unified conceptual framework and with a common methodological approach according to a four-tier model consisting of 1) the profiles of individual scientists as actors producing and mediating knowledge; 2) epistemic arenas; 3) the practices of ‘producing knowledge’ and ‘making science’; and, 4) the media of the circulation of knowledge. This model, as the backbone of the main chapters, on the one hand, seems to be suitable for capturing the concept of science, and on the other hand, the transition between old and new forms of knowledge, as well as the individual and communal epochal constructions of theory and practice.

DigiCirculation of Knowledge, 1770-1830: a digital anthology of sources 

The four-tier model applied in the synthesis volume (actors–spaces–practices–media) was also used to compile a digital anthology of sources of nearly forty-five author’s sheets, comprising a significant amount of hitherto unknown mainly manuscript sources, and to a lesser extent printed sources in Hungarian, Latin, and German from the period under study. The annotated critical edition of sources of various genres targeted different audiences, while the academic commentaries, university lecture notes, travel instructions, travel diaries, reports, and ego-documents (funeral orations and wills) reveal contemporary modes of speech and writing and specific language and concepts, but also capture the progress of the thought style (Denkstil) of the period, as well as the development of the practices of ‘making knowledge’ and ‘doing science’ and the changes in the focal points that determined the perception and observation of things and interactions. The publication of the sources in digital format makes it easy to search for and read about—in addition to the personal and spatial networks that are customarily illustrated in similar projects—patterns, internal events, and interrelationships associated with the process of disciplinarization due to the identification of plausible conceptual networks, and, at a later stage, to display them in the form of data visualizations. The categories that make up the conceptual networks have been developed by assigning subcategories to a total of nineteen period- and subject-specific main concepts mapped according to content and the use of language and concepts in the published excerpts.

A DigiCirculation of Knowledge (DICIKO) digital anthology of sources is available at this link: Tudásáramlás – wikibase-docker (elte-dh.hu)