Workshop in Villa Vigoni

by Jaap Geraerts

There’s a wonderful phrase in Dutch: “het nuttige met het aangename verenigen,” which means something like “to unite that which is useful (nuttig) with that which is pleasant (aangenaam).”  Although in general academia tends to be firmly tilted towards the former, occasionally it does happen that the coveted combination of utility and pleasantness is achieved. The week I spent at Villa Vigoni in Menaggio, Italy, together with a number of colleagues in late February/early March 2023, is a particularly great example thereof.

The occasion for meeting there and then was a week-long workshop organised by Francesca Cadeddu and Marco Büchler. Its title, “Religious studies in the digital age: aligning research methodologies and national strategies,” neatly alludes to most of the topics that were covered by scholars coming from various disciplines, ranging from linguistics and history, to computer science and the digital humanities. Each morning started with three presentations followed by a Q&A session. Taken together, the presentations comprised a wealth of topics such as the opportunities of AI, the encoding of particularly challenging primary sources due to their layout or use of little-studied languages (or both), the need for multilingual metadata, and so forth. However, the topics that were addressed were certainly not only technical in nature. Questions about representation, e.g. of underrepresented communities or understudied languages, formed an important part of the discussions as well.

I gave a short talk on the link between physical and digital (and/or digitized) sources, mainly on the basis of three projects I currently am or have been involved in: my own research project on the Schism of Utrecht, European peace treaties of the pre-modern era in data (FriVer+), and the Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR). How to maintain the links between primary (archival) sources and their digital surrogates? More importantly, how to convey to users the structure and limitations of digital data sets? If we want to ensure the (correct) use of our data by other scholars, robust documentation, albeit arguably not the sexiest part of academic projects, is necessary more than ever.

Interesting as the presentations were, they served a more important goal and mainly were meant as a segue into broader discussions about the various aspects and dimensions of a research infrastructure for religious studies. Discussions about the contours of such a research infrastructure – what could/should it look like, what kind(s) of data should it comprise, is a separate infrastructure for religious studies is actually necessary – transitioned seamlessly into questions about whether the sources used by religious studies are in any way unique and clearly distinguishable from the sources used by other disciplines. These discussions are very timely indeed: both in Germany (with the NFDI consortia) as well as in other European countries significant sums of money are invested in creating academic infrastructures. At the European level, too, initiatives for the creation of infrastructures have been or are undertaken, such as the Research Infrastructure for Religious Studies (ReIReS) and the RESILIENCE consortium that aims to create a research infrastructure for religious studies (several members of this consortium were present at and co-organised the workshop).

In the end, I think that we, although not providing a blueprint for a future research infrastructure for religious studies, did have engaging discussions and supplied the organizers with helpful ideas on how to move forward. The atmosphere certainly helped – although as a group we were heterogeneous in terms of disciplinary background and seniority, everyone seemed to be at ease to raise questions and share thoughts (or at least that was my impression). Because of the way in which the workshop was structured, with presentations in the morning and the discussions in the afternoon, these days were fruitful, but very intensive as well. Luckily, each day was punctuated by several delicious meals. As one might expect, the Italian cuisine certainly did not disappoint. Moreover, breakfast, lunch, and dinner proved to be good occasions to get to know each other and/or to catch up, and to have a chat about topics other than research or academic life in general. And if that was not pleasant enough, Menaggio is situated next to the breathtakingly beautiful lake Como, while the grounds and immediate surroundings of Villa Vigoni are equally stunning. Going for a wander while discussing work-related matters, following the example of the peripatetic philosophers (although I’m not making any grandiose claims about the level of our conversations), truly was a splendid example of “het nuttige met het aangename verenigen.” More of such workshops please!


Cite this article as: Jaap Geraerts, "Workshop in Villa Vigoni," in Digital Humanities Lab, 17/03/2023, https://dhlab.hypotheses.org/3771.

Featured image and all images in this post: photo by author, all rights reserved.

DH Lab Retreat 2022: Delving into goals, tasks and values

by Jaap Geraerts

In September 2019, so in pre-pandemic times, several (former) members of the IEG DH Lab went on a retreat to Kloster Jakobsberg for a couple of days. The main goal of this retreat was to discuss the individual research projects and to discover overlap between them and encourage cooperation within the frame of the DH Lab. In other words, the focus was on putting flesh on the bones on the laboratorial dimension of our research unit. „DH Lab Retreat 2022: Delving into goals, tasks and values“ weiterlesen

RSA 2022 in Dublin

By Jaap Geraerts

Two weeks ago, from March 29 until April 2, the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) conference took place in Dublin. It’s probably the largest conference for academics interested in the early modern period and it customarily attracts scholars from various historical disciplines and fields from all over the world. Over the last couple of years, the number of papers and panels on the digital humanities has been steadily increasing at this conference. For me this is good news: RSA now offers me a platform to share both my latest archival findings and to showcase the technical side of my project. „RSA 2022 in Dublin“ weiterlesen

Priests’ libraries in the Dutch Republic

By Jaap Geraerts and Sarah Büttner

The scholarly importance of “Priesterbibliotheken” (priests’ libraries) is well-known: they provide insight into what Catholic priests serving in the Holland Mission read or at least thought useful to own. Moreover, such libraries can tell us more about early modern Dutch Catholic spirituality, but also about the wider interest in books outside the remit of theology and pastoral care. Lastly, in particular libraries from the eighteenth century will also help to enhance our understanding of the schism which occurred in the Dutch Catholic Church. “Priesterbibliotheken (priests’ libraries) in the Dutch Republic” is a small pilot project which started at the IEG DH Lab in early 2021. The project aims to capture the bibliographical information contained in manuscript inventories of the libraries of Catholic priests serving in the Republic and making this available in digital form.
„Priests’ libraries in the Dutch Republic“ weiterlesen

Dealing with uncertainty and capturing the underrepresented

by Jaap Geraerts

Since I started my project on the schism in the Catholic Church in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic in the summer of 2019, I have been creating a dataset that comprises the information contained in lists of baptisms, burials, and marriages. This information enables me to trace the movement of Catholics to another, competing Catholic Church in the context of the schism. Consider, for example, Henricus Verbruggen and Maria Blomevelt. They baptised their first two children in a mission station that was part of the Church of Utrecht but had their third and last child baptised in the Roman Catholic Church (see Fig. 1). „Dealing with uncertainty and capturing the underrepresented“ weiterlesen

Research in times of COVID

by Jaap Geraerts

COVID-19 has posed a challenge, to put it mildly, to how most of us go about living our lives. Either in our personal life or work life, most if not all of us had to make significant adaptions in order to deal with a world that still is in the grasp of pandemic. The experience I’d like to focus on in this blog post, is that of doing research at these unprecedented times. Fairly soon after COVID-19 broke out, it became clear that it would have huge implications for researchers and teachers. Due to travel bans and other restrictions, virtually all conferences were either canceled or were held online in some form or another. In a short time span, teachers across the world had to go to extraordinary lengths to move their courses online. As libraries and archives closed their doors and traveling to or from particular countries became severely restricted or even impossible, the access to primary and secondary sources, the very fuel of our research, was hampered to a large degree. „Research in times of COVID“ weiterlesen

The Archaeology of Reading, COVID-19, and online teaching

by Jaap Geraerts

Prior to taking up my current position at the IEG, I was based at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) at University College London where I served as the postdoctoral fellow on the digital humanities project “The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe” (AOR). An international collaboration between CELL, Johns Hopkins University, and Princeton University, the project team, consisting of historians, computer engineers, and librarians, aimed to enable a more structured analysis of historical reading practices through the creation of an online resource. The end result is a modified IIIF-compliant viewer comprising a corpus of 36 early modern books annotated by Gabriel Harvey and John Dee and the fully searchable transcriptions of all the “interventions” they made in these books. This viewer is accompanied by a WordPress site which contains contextual information of the scholarly and technological aspects of the project.
„The Archaeology of Reading, COVID-19, and online teaching“ weiterlesen

ReIReS meetings in Paris

by Jaap Geraerts

The IEG is one of the twelve partners of the Horizon2020 project “Religious Infrastructure on Religious Studies”, mostly known by its acronym “ReIReS“. Within this project, one of the main responsibilities of the IEG is the organisation of the various training sessions such DH workshops and training schools that take place at each of the partner institutions. Of particular interest for the DH Lab at the IEG are the DH workshops which allow scholars from the partner institutions as well as from external institutions to become acquainted with various tools and methods that are customarily used within the broad field that has come to be called “Digital Humanities”.
„ReIReS meetings in Paris“ weiterlesen

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