Evan Carmouche – RSA Digital Resources

China Historical Christian Database (1550-1950)

The China Historical Christian Database (CHCD) quantifies and visualizes the place of Christianity in modern China (1550-1950). It provides users the tools to discover where every Christian church, school, hospital, orphanage, publishing house, and the like were located in China, and it documents who worked inside those buildings, both foreign and Chinese. Collectively, this information creates spatial maps and generates relational networks that reveal where, when, and how Western ideas, technologies, and practices entered China. Simultaneously, it uncovers how and through whom Chinese ideas, technologies, and practices were conveyed to the West.

IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive

IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive is redesigned, and back online. IDEA includes manuscript visualizations, videos, and a virtual model of Isabella d’Este’s famous studiolo as well as a Zotero bibliography of materials relating to Isabella and the Italian Renaissance. See IDEA’s News link for book announcements and other relevant notices.

Paper in Motion: Information and the Economy of Knowledge in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Paper in Motion homepage — https://www.paperinmotion.org/

This online exhibition consists of 93 different documents in Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Dutch, Spanish, German, Italian and Armenian, from archives in the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Egypt and Malta, all of which house paper-based records of administrative, financial and commercial activity between the late fourteenth and early eighteenth centuries. The exhibition thus samples some of the most relevant paper-based formats and documentary genres used to codify commercial information and financial value by different communities around the Mediterranean.

The exhibition was organized by José María Pérez Fernández (U. of Granada), Giovanni Tarantino (U. of Florence) Matteo Calcagni (European University Institute), as one of the activities conducted by “Paper in Motion”, which was in turn one of the four Work Groups of the PIMo COST Action. People in Motion (PIMo): Entangled Histories of Displacement across the Mediterranean (1492–1923)

Some relevant contents include the following:

Urus. Techniques and Reception of Prints in Poland-Lithuania (15th–17th century)

Urus is a guide for academics and general users interested in the themes of production and reception of prints in Poland, Lithuania, and Prussia from the 15th to the 17th centuries. The database takes its name from the aurochs — or urus in Latin — a now-extinct species of large wild cattle whose habitat in the 16th century was already limited to remote corners of Eastern European forests. The ambition of the Urus project is to collect hitherto insufficiently explored instances of Early Modern printmaking and print consumption in Poland, Lithuania, and Prussia. The database provides an insight into robust East and Central European material, both textual and iconographic, and its far-reaching connections.

The making of Urus brought together members of two scientific projects led by Professor Grażyna Jurkowlaniec and funded by the National Science Centre, Poland: “Reframed Image: Reception of Prints in the Kingdom of Poland from the End of the Fifteenth to the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century” (2016–2020) and “Matrix of Confusion: The Production of Woodcut Illustrations in Poland–Lithuania and Prussia until the Early Seventeenth Century” (2019–2023).

Magnetic Margins. A Census and Annotations Database

Magnetic Margins homepage — https://www.magnetic-margins.com/resource/Start

The project Magnetic Margins investigates how and by whom the most important early modern book publications on magnetism were read and annotated. This database provides a census of major publications in this field of study and maps annotations in the individual copies of these editions.

Rara Magnetica. A Repository of Historical Sources Related to the Premodern Research on Magnetism

Rara Magnetica Homepage — https://www.raramagnetica.de/

Rara Magnetica (1269-1599) is the name of Gustav Hellmann’s well known anthology published in 1898. With this collection, he sought to provide access to some of the earliest, yet rare publications in the field of geomagnetism that predated William Gilbert’s landmark publication De Magnete of 1600. The digital project and platform Rara Magnetica translates these efforts into the digital domain, going far beyond digital editions.

The need to publish important but understudied sources is most efficiently achieved by providing curated digital structured and linked data. Rara Magnetica hence – as an ongoing project – is both a repository and an interactive research platform. It publishes scans and transcriptions of (many hitherto unpublished) sources, data visualizations, and databases, all related to the premodern study of magnetism. Moreover, it provides various tools to investigate each of these resources independently and in combination. A major aim in fact is to enhance multimodal analyses that transcend media barriers by allowing to research imagery along with full texts, material sources along with their conceptual content. This is achieved by various but interlinked tools providing different ways of looking at the same sources.

The Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project

Virtual St Pauls Cathedral Project Homepage — https://vpcathedral.chass.ncsu.edu/

The Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project recreates two full days in St Paul’s Cathedral — an ordinary (or ferial) day, the Tuesday after the First Sunday in Advent in 1625 and a Festival Day, Easter Sunday in 1624. These services reflect, in the choice of music and in other ways, differences in style of performance reflecting the difference between a festival, or special occasion and an ordinary, everyday occasion.

The Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project contains resources for understanding worship in English cathedrals and parish churches in the early seventeenth century. Chief among them are auralized recordings of the services appointed for use every day of the year — the Divine Services of Morning Prayer (Matins) and Evening Prayer (Evensong) — as well as services appointed for a narrower range of days — (the Great Litany, appointed for Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays and Holy Communion, appointed for Sundays and Holy Days).

The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project

Virtual Paul's Cross Project Homepage — https://vpcross.chass.ncsu.edu/

The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project uses digital modeling technology to create the experience of hearing John Donne’s sermon for Gunpowder Day, November 5th, 1622, from within a detailed visual and acoustic model of Paul’s Churchyard. The user can hear Donne’s sermon unfold in real time from 8 different positions in the Churchyard and in the presence of 4 different sizes of crowd, all the while immersed in the sounds of early modern London.

The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project enables us to experience Donne’s sermon as a performed event that unfolds in real time as a complement to our ability to study it as a printed text or theological essay.

The Virtual Trinity Chapel Project

Virtual Trinity Chapel Project Homepage — https://vtcp.chass.ncsu.edu/

The Virtual Trinity Chapel Project brings together an extensive array of materials documenting the Service of Consecration for Trinity Chapel, Lincoln’s Inn, on Thursday, May 22nd, 1623. Materials include visual models recreating the interior and exterior of Trinity Chapel on that occasion, as well as documents describing what happened, who took part, and what they made of it afterwards.

The service of Consecration for Trinity Chapel turns out to have been one of the most fully documented worship services to take place in England in the early modern period. As a result, we have been able to recreate a remarkably detailed, almost minute-by-minute account of the service itself, as well as what some of those in attendance made of it in retrospect.

The Virtual John Donne Project

The Virtual John Donne Project uses digital modeling technology to to enable users to explore the lived religion of England in the early seventeenth century. This site provides quick access to visual and acoustic recreations of worship services and preaching inside St Paul’s Cathedral and in Paul’s Churchyard, as well as inside Trinity Chapel at Lincoln’s Inn, while John Donne was Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Our goal is to recreate worship services in the specific settings of their original performance so they may be experienced as they unfold in real time. To the vast majority of the English the reformed Church of England was defined by the occasions of corporate, liturgical, and sacramental worship they participated in and were formed by. These services brought the private events of their lives — from birth to marriage to death — into the realm of public life.