Posts Tagged ‘intellectual history’
“Study the past if you would define the future”*…
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB) is a digital reconstruction of the early modern social network that scholars and students from all over the world will be able to collaboratively expand, revise, curate, and critique. Historians and literary critics have long studied the way that early modern people associated with each other and participated in various kinds of formal and informal groups. By data-mining existing scholarship that describes relationships between early modern persons, documents, and institutions, we have created a unified, systematized representation of the way people in early modern England were connected…
Follow the connections at Six Degrees of Francis Bacon.
* Confucius
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As we marvel at the interconnectedness of it all, we might recall that it was on this date in 1606 that The Virginia Company loaded three ships with settlers, who set sail to establish Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. As this was the UK’s first colony, today can be considered the birthday of the British Empire.
A rendering of the initial settlement/fort at Jamestown, c. 1607
“When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him”*…
Genius follows its own law of gravity. It migrates in ever greater numbers to where it thrives. Hence places like Silicon Valley – and attempts to replicate it elsewhere, like London’s Silicon Roundabout. The phenomenon is older than the microchip, of course…
Watch the centers of creative gravity migrate through Europe, from 1400 to 1950, at “The Geography of Genius.”
* Jonathan Swift (the inspiration for John Kennedy Toole)
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As we put on our sailin’ shoes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1853 that Steinway & Sons sold its first piano in the United States. The company had been founded in March of that year by Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, who’d started making pianos in his native Germany in 1935 (and who didn’t officially change his name to “Steinway” until 1864). Working in a loft on Varrick Street in Manhattan, he called his first U.S. piano “Number 483” as he’d built 482 pianos before immigrating. It was sold to a New York family for $500. Over the next thirty years, Henry and his sons, C. F. Theodore, Charles, Henry Jr., William, and Albert, developed the modern piano; almost half of the company’s 127 patented inventions were developed during this period.
An “Original Style” Steinway piano like #483
* Jonathan Swift
“Originality is nothing but judicious plagiarism”*…
Readers seemed to enjoy Simon Raper’s diagrammatic history of philosophy (see “Who’s Hume“), so may also appreciate Brendan Griffen‘s even more ambitious visual essay– a depiction of the connections between every important thinker, ever: “The Graph of Ideas.”
He fields it at two levels of detail; the first (pictured at the top of this post, with a link to a zoomable version) treats roughly 850 thinkers, clustering those most closely related and showing how each is connected. For example:
The second treats his entire set of 4,200 thinkers; it is here (it’s a 50MB file, so takes a while to load– but it’s worth it).
Read the backstory– the method used and the iterative attempts to avoid a Western bias– here.
[TotH to CoDesign]
* Voltaire
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As we honor our ancestors, we might send carefully-scrawled birthday greetings to Nicolas-Jacques Conté; he was born on this date in 1755. While Conté was an accomplished painter, balloonist, and army officer, he is best remembered for his contribution to the later contributions to the charts above: the invention of the modern pencil.
Your correspondent is off for a period of deep and serious study of the smoked and fried foods of the Low Country. Sticky fingers being the impediment to keyboarding that they are, regular service will resume in mid-August… Y’all have fun!
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