Reassembling the republic of letters - A linked data approach

Abstract

Between 1500 and 1800, a revolution in postal communication allowed ordinary men and women to scatter letters across and beyond Europe. This exchange helped knit together what contemporaries called the respublica litteraria, or Republic of Letters, a knowledge-based civil society, crucial to that era's intellectual breakthroughs, and formative of many modern European values and institutions. To enable effective Digital Humanities research on the epistolary data distributed in different countries and collections, metadata about the letters have been aggregated, harmonised, and provided for the research community through the Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) catalogue. This paper discusses the idea and benefits of using Linked Data as the basis for a potential future framework for EMLO, and presents our experiences with a first demonstrator implementation of such a system.