Marieke Hendriksen will present first results of ARTECHNE database project at the 2017 Renaissance Society of America conference

On March 30, Marieke Hendriksen will give a presentation titled ‘Mapping technique in the arts and sciences: the ARTECHNE database project’ in the New Technologies and Renaissance Studies sessions at the 2017 Renaissance Society of America conference.

Abstract

The ARTECHNE project at Utrecht University studies how technique was transmitted among artists, artisans, and scholars between 1500 and 1950. As part of my postdoctoral research within the project, I am developing an online database containing searchable full-text early modern recipes, artist handbooks, and technical instructions with the help of the UU Digital Humanities Lab. To generate database content, I rely on corrected OCR of digitized texts and crowd sourced manuscript transcriptions. All sources are geotagged and eventually the database will be linked to an interactive semantic map in which the geographical spread of particular terms, recipes, and techniques over time can be visualized. The project thus integrates various new technologies and recently developed DH methods. This paper presents the first results of the database project and reflects on the question how much digital literacy on the part of historians is required to successfully set up research projects relying on new technologies.