Imagine a thousand-volume work entitled The Intellectual History of Europe. Imagine also a great convocation of resurrected thinkers, at which every person mentioned in the pages of this work is given a copy and invited to begin by reading the passages concerning himself or herself, and then to read alternately backwards and forwards until he has mastered the full thousand volumes. An ideal work of this title would fulfil the following conditions:

1. The person whose activities and writings are being described finds the description intelligible, except for the parenthetical remarks which say things like ‘This was later to be known as …’ and ‘Since the distinction between X and Y was yet to be drawn, A’s use of “Z” cannot be interpreted as …’, and he comes to understand even these remarks as he reads on.

2. On finishing the book, everyone described endorses the description of himself as, though of course insufficiently detailed, at least reasonably accurate and sympathetic.

3. The entire assemblage of the resurrected, at the point at which they have all read through the book, are in as good a position to exchange views, to argue, to engage in collaborative inquiry on subjects of common interest, as secondary sources for their colleagues’ works can make them.

This seems a plausible ideal for intellectual history because we hope that such history will give us a sense of Europe as (in the phrase which Gadamer has adapted from Hölderin) ‘the conversation which we are’.

Earlier this week the Guardian, Forbes and others covered the discovery of 500 fairy tales collected by 19th century folklorist Franz Xaver von Schönwerth. I sent a note about this to Professor Jack Zipes, who promptly replied urging caution about the discovery and pointing to many other (in his view more interesting) 19th century collections from France and Germany. An expanded version of his note is now up on the website for the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy.

Says Professor Zipes:

I have only read Schönwerth’s tales from the earlier three volumes, and they range from boring to good examples of Bavarian customs. Nothing to get excited about, just as there is nothing to get excited about in the more recent example provided in The Guardian.

He continues:

I can point to some brilliant German collections by Theodor Vernaleken, Johann Wilhelm Wolf, Ignaz and Joseph Zingerele, Heinrich Pröhle, Josef Haltrich, Christian Schneller, Karl Haupt, Hermann Knust, Carl and Theodor Colshorn, etc. etc. and even more brilliant French collections by François-Marie Luzel, Paul Sébillot, Emmanuel Cosquin, Jean-François Bladé, Henry Carnoy, etc. etc. that contain tales fastidiously recorded by these folklorists, who translated them from dialect versions. They also include raw dialect versions with their translations.

And then:

There is also the question of artistic value. Many of the European folklorists like the Grimms, had a great artistic sensibility. The artistic power of the Grimms’ tales and other collections can be experienced when they are read aloud. I believe that the best folklorists always had to “translate” and “adapt” the tales they collected, and they did this while trying to remain true to the spoken word. So, you can praise Schönwerth’s “raw” tales, but those that I have read thus far lack an important element of artistic re-creation.

He says that “we have not yet translated the best European folk-tale collections into English and given them their due recognition” and that “the general public is not aware that Schönwerth’s work was just a drop in the bucket of folk-tale collecting in Europe during the nineteenth century”.

Salman Rushdie takes up the idea of a “Sea of Stories” from the Kathasaritsagara (literally: “Sea of the Rivers of Story”) an 11th century collection of Indian fairy tales and folktales. Liquid metaphors are an attractive way of alluding to the richness and reciprocal influence of various fairy tale and storytelling traditions. The many tales in One Thousand and One Nights wonderfully exemplify how narrative themes and patterns are echoed, refracted, and parodied. The epic, rhapsodic, near geometrical complexity that emerges from the relations between the tales leaves the reader with a taste of the infinite, a sense of awe that could easily be described as oceanic. Rushdie writes:

So Iff the Water Genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Streams of Story, and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the Ocean began to have an effect on Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and as many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

While the Sea of Stories will remain a Platonic fantasy, one can imagine its worldly counterpart in the form of a comprehensive scholarly index of fairy tales and folk tales from around the world. One could explore the index by language, country of origin, date, and author. Perhaps one could explore linkages between early sources and contemporary retellings. Or explore tales by theme or trope, hopefully without falling prey to a Proppian hubris of comprehensive classification and analysis.

This is something that I’ve been wanting to pursue for a while as a project tentatively dubbed the ‘Synoptic Folktale Index’ with the Sussex Centre, which was founded by my dad. Several people have expressed support for the idea. Professor D. L. Ashliman has very kindly offered to donate his collection of Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts to the project, as well as a large private database of bibliographic references. Professor Jack Zipes has given us several big bibliographies of works that he’s used for his own research and publications. The index could be powered by the open source TEXTUS platform, which would enable users to update bibliographies and upload, transcribe and translate texts. The index would enable users to see which tales have and have not been translated, and a translation fund could help to incentivise new translations.

In Rushdie’s world, the Sea of Stories is a fertile source for storytellers, whom, if they are brave and “very, very careful, or very, very highly skilled”, can “dip a cup into the Ocean” and “fill it with water from a single, pure Stream of Story” (ibid, p. 72). The protagonist of the book learns that “nothing comes from nothing”, “no story comes from nowhere”, and that “new stories are born from old” (p. 86). This is explained with reference to the digestive systems of “artistic Plentimaw fishes”, who help to generate new tales by combining (parts of) old tales.

Many German folklore collectors in the 18th and 19th century believed that folk culture was a fertile soil out of which new works could grow – by retelling, reworking, synthesising and incorporating traditional tales. Johann Gottfried Herder helped to popularise the idea that literary genius could grow out of folk culture – an idea which was fostered by his former teacher Johann Georg Hamann, who was in turn influenced by the vegetative metaphors of English poet Edward Young, who was reacting against what he considered the staid, formalist aesthetic theories of his contemporaries. The paradigmatic case to which German literary theorists after Herder turned was Shakespeare, whose works they believed had grown out of an abundant amalgam of tales, legends, and myths.

One can envisage that of the many thousands of folk tales that have been collected, some will be of historical interest to those specialist oceanographers who are interested in the subtle inflections and shades of variation in the great waves that roll across the Sea of Stories. But perhaps for the rest of us, the value of a given tale will for the most part be proportional to the talents of the teller.

I’ve started planning this, with the working title “Romanticism Without Borders”. Below is a tentative sketch about the idea. If you’re interested in finding out more or in being kept in the loop, please add your details here.

Romanticism Without Borders is an international, interdisciplinary series of workshops about the influence and legacy of different forms of romanticism around the world, across national borders, across genres. The first events will be held in Berlin, London, and New York City.

Submissions should be in English, accessible for the non-specialist, and no more than 3,000 words in length. Very concise, clearly written, highly focused pieces are strongly encouraged. Topics might include:

• History of the use of terms such as ‘romanticism’ or ‘romantisch’, attempts to define romanticism, the development of the romantic canon.
• Reception and influence of romantic authors and works in different countries – e.g. reception of Coleridge in Germany or Novalis in Britain.
• History of translations and editions of romantic works, as well as reviews, anthologies, and critical or historical texts in countries around the world.
• The role of scholars, critics, writers and others who have helped to translate, introduce of promote romantic authors or works in countries and languages around the world.
• Influence of romantic authors and works on figures not traditionally associated with romanticism – e.g. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin.
• How romantic works have affected or shaped different genres and media, e.g. photography, film, theatre.
• How romantic works and ideas have shaped theory or practise in other fields and disciplines – e.g. ecology, law, psychiatry.

Swedenborg’s system of the world wants central spontaneity; it is dynamic, not vital, and lacks power to generate life. There is no individual in it. The universe is a gigantic crystal, all whose atoms and laminae lie in uninterrupted order and with unbroken unity, but cold and still. What seems an individual and a will, is none. There is an immense chain of intermediation, extending from centre to extremes, which bereaves every agency of all freedom and character. The universe, in his poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only reflects the mind of the magnetizer. Every thought comes into each mind by influence from a society of spirits that surround it, and into these from a higher society, and so on. All his types mean the same few things. All his figures speak one speech. All his interlocutors Swedenborgize.

Last week I went to the opening of Remnants: a selection of objects from the Swedenborg archive, organised by the Swedenborg Society, a charity founded in 1810 to promote the works of Emanuel Swedenborg. A new history of the Society was launched to correspond with the opening of the exhibition.

The exhibition mainly consisted of bits and pieces of Swedenborgian paraphernalia, from a writing table, pieces of tree bark and walking sticks that belonged to the man himself, to portraits and letters from prominent Society members, to manuscripts, dinner menus, programmes, postcards, receipts, tickets, telegrams, newspaper clippings, and a large collection of ‘magic lantern’ slides.

Two drawers were dedicated to James John Garth Wilkinson, a writer, homeopath and editor of Swedenborg’s works. Wilkinson was apparently an avid letter writer. His correspondents included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, John Ruskin, and Henry James Sr. (father of Henry the novelist and William the philosopher and psychologist). Of him, Emerson writes:

Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the ten years from 1734 to 1744, and they remained from that time neglected; and now, after their century is complete, he has at last found a pupil in Mr. Wilkinson, in London, a philosophic critic, with a coequal vigor of understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon’s, who has restored his master’s buried books to the day, and transferred them, with every advantage, from their forgotten Latin into English, to go round the world in our commercial and conquering tongue. This startling reappearance of Swedenborg, after a hundred years, in his pupil, is not the least remarkable fact in his history. Aided it is said by the munificence of Mr. Clissold, and also by his literary skill, this piece of poetic justice is done. The admirable preliminary discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes, throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into shade, and leave me nothing to say on their proper grounds.

The library is filled with books about the Swedenborg and the Swedenborgian legacy, many of them published by the Society, including about his influence on William Blake, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walt Whitman, Charles Baudelaire, George MacDonald, William Butler Yeats, August Strindberg, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jorge Luis Borges, and many others. Whether explicit or subterranean: all roads lead to Swedenborg.

The elegant spread of forensic detritus, sprinkled with allusions to “fairy rings”, apparitions and the spirit world, certainly makes for an uncanny visit.

Lewis White Beck‘s 1969 Early German Philosophy is a long, rich and rambling chronicle of philosophical thinkers and philosophical ideas originating from what we now call Germany, roughly from the birth of St. Ambrose in 340 to the death of Kant in 1804.

Beck opens the book with the question “Can there be, should there be, a history of German philosophy?” (p. 1). He proceeds to argue against many of the superficial justifications for embarking on a “national history of philosophy”:

Within the history of European culture we see thoughts expressed in various languages by men from different parts of the Continent. But these components are hardly well-formed unities with sharp edges. None of them is comprehensible by itself. In every one of them, important men and ideas from another must be included. No history of English or German philosophy can be understood without Descartes; no history of French or German philosophy can be understood without Locke; no history of French thought can be understood without Leibniz. If we add to this caution the recollection that few countries are now geographically what they were five centuries ago and that up to three centuries ago most philosophical works were written in a single language and passed, more freely than they do now, from one part of Europe to another, a national history of philosophy may appear at best episodic, at worst arbitrary. Why not write a history of philosophy mentioning only men whose names begin with the letter “p”? (p. 2)

He continues:

After reading a vast amount of writings purporting to list the distinctive and peculiar traits of German philosophy, I must report that I have found no generalization to which many important exceptions cannot be found in a moment’s reflection. Perhaps the notion of an ideal type or family resemblences may help us find the nongeographical meaning of “German philosophy”. But my experience of attempts to do this is little more encouraging. (p. 3)

Instead Beck argues that a “national history of philosophy” can be “parasitic” upon the study of “interests and conflicts in politics, society, religion, literature and art” during a particular historical period.

Throughout the book he alludes to circumstances and “complexes of powers and problems” that are relevant to the development of philosophical thought in Germany. A major theme is the way in which the development of the university system shaped philosophy. Beck argues that we should not underestimate the impact of the fact that many important philosophers were attached to universities. Philosophical movements sprang up around particular institutions (“Marburg neo-Kantianism”, “Jena Romanticism”, “Berlin idealism”). Universities were state institutions, which meant that political criticism was either absent or highly disguised. He contends that the nature of the university system meant that doctrines would often quickly become dogmas which gave rise to antithetical reactions – “pantheisms, humanisms, vitalisms, mysticisms”.

Beck takes up Hegel’s metaphor of a cathedral for “the mind of the people”, whose “vaults, passages, pillars and vestibules” have “proceeded out of one whole and are directed to one end”. But while Hegel’s cathedral presumably possesses a unity and coherence which reflects and derives from the unity of a ‘people’, Beck’s cathedral is full of contingencies and its unity and coherence is only in appearance:

The “German spirit” is not something brooding over a thousand years of philosophy; it is a name for immensely rich and varied responses to the mysteries of existence [...] Unless this variety is kept in mind, conceptions of German philosophy will be so simple that they will seem to explain it, but will be in fact so simple that they explain nothing. (p. 5)

He goes on to describe the difference between an ‘ordinary’ history of philosophy and a ‘national’ history of philosophy as follows:

Ordinarily the history of philosophy is a history of philosophical problems and ideas embodied in the work of the two or three dozen most important philosophers, far apart from each other both spatially and temporally. In a national history of philosophy, on the other hand, one must deal with many more philosophers, few of whom can be considered world figures. The continuities of a national history, therefore, are spatial and temporal as well as intellectual. (p. 14)

Thus begins his project, which is epic in scope. The following is an indicative (but certainly not exhaustive) list of figures whom we encounter throughout the course of the book: Albertus Magnus, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Johannes Althusius, Paracelsus, Philipp Melanchthon, Jakob Böhme, Johann Jakob Spener, Joachim Jungius, Joseph Clauberg, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, Erhard Weigel, Christian Thomasius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Christian Wolff, Johann Christoph Gottsched, Johann Jakob Bodmer, Johann Jakob Breitinger, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Georg Friedrich Meier, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Georg Hamann, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Johann Gottfried Herder, Christian August Crusius, Johann Heinrich Lambert, and Johann Nicholas Tetens.

Each chapter gives an overview of thinkers, ideas and schools of thought from a given period in German philosophy or clustered around a certain theme, with the exception of full chapters on Nicholas of Cusa, Leibniz, Lessing and Kant, whom receive more extensive treatment.

The book gives a wonderfully opulent picture of the transmission, reception and influence of different ideas, texts and thinkers. For example, the reader is given a sense of how Aristotle was received: which bits became known at different points, how he was read, what his reputation was like, and the effect of various religious and political decrees on his theological and philosophical interpretation. We learn of things like how Neoplatonism came into philosophy via mystical theology and Nicholas of Cusa, how Lutheran and Calvinist doctrine were transliterated into metaphysical speculation, the reputation and influence of Cartesian, Lockean, Spinozistic, Leibnizian and Wolffian ideas at different points, and how bits of Lambert, Crusius and Tetens were taken up by Kant. But Beck also gives us a welcome caution against taking the ‘influence game’ too seriously:

Looking for sources is a pleasant game … but it it is a dangerous game if played with too serious a purpose – played as if a philosopher can write only what he has read in another book. (p. 457)

Beck’s book plots the trajectory of philosophy from being predominantly an ancilla Ecclesiae (handmaiden to the church) or an ancilla theologiae (handmaiden to theology), to being an important and independent secular discipline. It shows how

[...] the Church had to develop talents and skills that history showed would not long remain humble servants of her own purposes. (p. 31)

Beck highlights the theological roots of many disputes, debates, and dogmas. Proponents of the Aufklärer were on the whole significantly less secular or anticlerical than their French or English counterparts. Romantic and proto-Romantic critics of the Enlightenment were deeply influenced by various forms of Pietism and mysticism. From metaphors and assumptions to moves and arguments, German philosophy is saturated in god talk.

As well as tracing the contours of tendencies and tributaries in the German philosophical tradition, there are some fantastic morsels of (mostly completely unnecessary) detail about its figures and episodes. Albertus Magnus had a vision in which “the devil (uncharacteristically, to be sure) is said to have … tried unsuccessfully to frighten him from the study of Aristotle” (p. 31). Thomasius was the “first professor to wear a sword while lecturing” (p. 249). While defending “Wolff’s restricted version of the theory of pre-established harmony” Gottsched “was so thoroughly defeated in the subsequent disputation that he burst into tears” (p. 279). Frederick the Great liked to forget he was king, but “wanted his companions who were poets and philosophes to remember it always” (p. 309). Frederick’s father Friedrich Wilhelm asked the Berlin Academy to “make the path of the sun around the earth a circle and not a square” and to “make sure there were as many good days and as few bad days as possible in the calendar” (p. 314).

To mention just a few of the possibly less familiar ideas that the book is brimming with: the metaphysics of light and emanation-theory of the Neoplatonists (pp. 39, 47), Nicholas of Cusa’s microcosmic conception of humankind and geometrical explorations of the infinite (pp. 57, 65), Paracelsus’s doctrine of ‘signatures’ and the idea that creation emerges from matter like a sculpture from a block (pp. 143-144), Sebastian Franck’s notion that the bird is sung and flown by God (p. 149), Valentin Weigel’s conception of the mind as a pool of water (p. 150), Joachim Jungius’s belief that nature writes with an atomic alphabet rather than in pictures (p. 177), Erhard Weigel’s mechanical representation of moral concepts (p.194), Leibniz’s suggestion that there is a world of creatures in every drop of water (p. 244), and Thomasius’s contention that “light and air are a spiritual being” (p. 252).

Beck often has an air of affectionate impatience when he is presenting the ideas of the many characters in his story. He apologises for the “distressing length” (p. 139) and “regrettable diversity” (p. 160) of his exposition. “Philosophers” he says “seem unable to remain silent about the unnameable, the indescribable, the ineffable” (p. 50). And he certainly isn’t an uncritical or unphilosophical interpreter. He has an eye for “philosophical talent” and does his best to reconstruct the arguments and theses of thinkers he believes are in possession of it. But he also isn’t afraid to note the absence of such talent. One of Kant’s arguments “is so lame that I shall not reproduce it” (p. 451). Of one of Erhard Weigel’s books that he was unable to locate, he writes:

[...] from what I have seen, one may perhaps be permitted to entertain a doubt as to whether I or my reader will suffer unduly from lack of first-hand knowledge of Weigel’s other writings (p. 195)

A passage which highlights Beck’s dedication to his project occurs in relation to his suggestion that the intellectual career of Leibniz “resembles a fugue”, whereby “at any moment, a cross section of all his thoughts shows a marvelous harmony, with the same or analgous concepts undergoing like development in each of the staves”. In a footnote to support the analogy, he writes:

This image is no doubt fanciful, but it is not fantastic. For in studying Leibniz I found it useful to use a kind of fugal schema. I took large sheets which I dated, one for each year of Leibniz’ career. I divided the sheets into sections, marked off by principal concepts, and then pasted slips of paper with key sentences in these slots. It was dramatic to see an idea in one slot on one page reappear in other slots a few pages later, to see how consistent Leibniz was on any one or two pages, to see how much change there was between distant pages, and to notice how little there was in any one slot that did not have a harmonic counterpart in the other “staves”. (p. 203)

Early German Philosophy is a work of scholarship the likes of which are now lamentably rare. While it can be slow going and the terrain is often tough, its philosophical acumen and historical erudition conspire to leave its readers with an dizzying panoptic impression of the contingent historical development of the vast cathedral that is the subject of the book.

TEXTUS is an open source platform for working with collections of texts and metadata. It enables users to transcribe, translate, and annotate texts, and to manage associated bibliographic data.

Here’s the rationale:

The combination of freely available digital copies of public domain works, open bibliographic data and open source tools has the potential to revolutionise research in the humanities. However there are currently numerous obstacles which mean that they are often under-utilised by scholars and students in teaching and research:

• From classic literary and cultural works, to letters, drafts, notes, and other historical documents, there is a huge amount of freely available public domain material that is highly relevant to scholars and students engaged in research in the humanities. But these works can be difficult to find, difficult to work with, and works by a given author may be scattered in a variety of locations. Search results may be confusing or unclear. Automated Optical Character Recognition of texts may be inaccurate or incomplete. The metadata for the work for may be unclear and the provenance and rights status for a given digital edition may be unknown. It is not always clear how to cite passages from digital editions of public domain works.
• Over the past few years, libraries and other cultural heritage organisations have been releasing open data about works they hold. This has the potential to be a rich resource for scholars interested in building scholarly bibliographies and working with large collections of texts. While there are a growing number of tools and services for working with bibliographic data, many researchers may not know how to use these, and online bibliographies may not link through to digital copies of public domain works which are available online.
• There are a growing number of open source tools for transcribing, translating and annotating texts. However many of these are one off projects and it may not be clear how to deploy the tools in relation to a given text or collection of texts.

Here’s what it would do:

The TEXTUS platform will enable users to:

• Transcribe texts from images, PDFs or other non-machine readable sources.
• View texts and translations side by side – and create new translations of texts for use in teaching or research.
• Annotate texts, and share annotations with groups of users, or with the public.
• Curate, share and export collections of bibliographic metadata (scholarly references), including metadata associated with texts published on the platform.

Here’s a peek under the hood:

TEXTUS builds on and utilises existing best of breed open source components and software packages such as:

• Annotator – an open-source Javascript tool to enable annotations to be added to any webpage
• Bibserver – which includes numerous tools, services and standards for working with bibliographic metadata
• Open Literature – which powers OpenShakespeare, OpenMilton and other sites
• Public Domain Works – a nascent directory of works which have entered the public domain in different countries around the world
• Scripto – an open source tool that enables users to contribute transcriptions to online documentary projects
• WordPress – due to its popularity, ease of use, and extensive plugin system, TEXTUS will use WordPress as its main CMS

If you’re interested, you can join discussion on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s open-humanities mailing list.

For several years I’ve been meaning to start OpenPhilosophy.org, which would be a collection of open resources related to philosophy for use in teaching and research. There would be a focus on the history of philosophy, particularly on primary texts that have entered the public domain, and on structured data about philosophical texts.

The project could include:

• A collection of public domain philosophical texts, in their original languages. This would include so called ‘minor’ figures as well as well known thinkers. The project would bring together texts from multiple online sources – from projects like Europeana, the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg or Wikimedia Commons, to smaller online collections from libraries, archives, academic departments or individual scholars. Every edition would be rights cleared to check that it could be freely redistributed, and would be made available either under an open license, with a rights waiver or a public domain dedication.
• Translations of public domain philosophical texts, including historical translations which have entered the public domain, and more recent translations which have been released under an open license.
• Ability to lay out original texts and translations side by side – including the ability to create new translations, and to line up corresponding sections of the text.
• Ability to annotate texts, including private annotations, annotations shared with specific users or groups of users, and public annotations. This could be done using the Annotator tool.
• Ability to add and edit texts, e.g. by uploading or by importing via a URL for a text file (such as a URL from Project Gutenberg). Also ability to edit texts and track changes.
• Ability to be notified of new texts that might be of interest to you – e.g. by subscribing to certain philosophers.
• Stable URLs to cite texts and or sections of texts – including guidance on how to do this (e.g. automatically generating citation text to copy and paste in a variety of common formats).

The project could also include a basic interface for exploring and editing structured data on philosophers and philosophical works:

• Structured bibliographic data on public domain philosophical works – including title, year, publisher, publisher location, and so on. Ability to make lists of different works for different purposes, and to export bibliographic data in a variety of formats (building on existing work in this area – such as Bibliographica and related projects).
• Structured data on secondary texts, such as articles, monographs, etc. This would enable users to browse secondary works about a given text. One could conceivably show which works discuss or allude to a given section of a primary text.
• Structured data on the biographies of philosophers – including birth and death dates and other notable biographical and historical events. This could be combined with bibliographic data to give a basic sense of historical context to the texts.

Other things might include:

• User profiles – to enable people to display their affiliation and interests, and to be able to get in touch with other users who are interested in similar topics.
• Audio version of philosophical texts – such as from Librivox.
• Links to open access journal articles.
• Images and other media related to philosophy.
• Links to Wikipedia articles and other introductory material.
• Educational resources and other material that could be useful in a teaching/learning context – e.g. lecture notes, slide decks or recordings of lectures.

While there are lots of (more or less ambitious!) ideas above, the key thing would be to develop the project in conjunction with end users in philosophy departments, including undergraduate students and researchers. Having something simple that could be easily used and adopted by people who are teaching, studying or researching philosophy or other humanities disciplines would be more important that something cutting edge and experimental but less usable. Hence it would be really important to have a good, intuitive user interface and lots of ongoing feedback from users.

What do you think? Interested in helping out? Know of existing work that we could build on (e.g. bits of code or collections of texts)? Please do leave a comment below, join discussion on the open-humanities mailing list or send me an email!

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bouded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below – one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon’s six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian. One of the hexagon’s free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first – identical in fact to all. To the left and the right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other, for satisfying one’s physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. In the vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite – if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication? I prefer to dream that banished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite…. Light is provided by certain spherical fruits that bear the name “bulbs”. There are two of these bulbs in each hexagon, set crosswise. The light they give is insufficient, and unceasing.

After much sketching, drafting, discussing, plotting, and puzzling, we ended up postponing the exercise indefinitely, concluding that, whether by accident or design (one would certainly not put the latter past Borges), constructing a model of the library was quite plausibly impossible.

A small yet astounding exhibition of some of the recent works of Ben Clement and Sebastian de la Cour in Berlin last week reminded me of the project, which I had nearly forgotten about. From the exhibition blurb:

Individually and as a whole, their highly-crafted pieces – including a wooden sarcophagus housing a mechanical theatre, a delicately collapsing staircase and a mountainous adjustable-height desk – not only transform the familiar spaces they tenant, but also ask provocative questions of the standpoints from which such spaces are seen. benandsebastian work from a need to explore, probe and question the world around them – through architectural constructions. For them, architecture is not only the buildings we inhabit, but also a way of thinking that can be explored through the spaces of mythical stories, utopian models, economic systems and power relations. Working through a process of serious play, they are not afraid to explore the dysfunctional and unfashionable. Their recent work has taken inspiration from mediaeval rituals, romantic ruins, office politics and a Manhattan urban legend.

Many of the works exhibited playfully incorporate an unlikely blend of textures, surfaces, and other decorative and visual elements alluding to a rich variety of styles and periods in art, architecture and design. Roman ruins conceal hieroglyphs. Often the context of the works is ambiguous, proportion is lost and scale is exploded – leading the visitor poised between interior and exterior, the micro and the macro, object and model.

One’s eyes wander across what is at one moment a public square, the next moment the seat of a chair, one moment a tabletop, the next moment a telescopically unfolding multi-story pyramid structure – with alternating floors of jungle plants and office units, prison bars and birdcages. Buried in a stack of newspaper, we see a scene depicting the notorious hoarders Homer and Langley Collyer, doomed by their obsession. Peering into through the cracks in a large box, we see a funeral procession for the last queen of Denmark. Visually some of the pieces are reminiscent of M. C. Escher, Piero Fornasetti, Giovanni Battista Piranesi or the Brothers Quay. Most of them are highly atmospheric, weaving their spaces with fragments of narrative.

Writers such as Borges, Calvino, Eco, Kafka, Perec, Sebald and others use architectural structures in their literary works to explore emotional states, metaphysical themes, or reflections on history or society. Clement and de la Cour seem to infuse this kind of architectural literature back into their pieces to create a kind of allusive, literary architecture.

In my research I often wonder about whom and what the people I’m reading read. Did Wittgenstein read Nietzsche? Did Nietzsche read Hegel? Did Hegel read Shakespeare? Did Shakespeare read Chaucer? Did Chaucer read Sophocles?

Knowing which texts a given writer was aware of (and which they probably weren’t aware of) can help us to understand them and their works better. For example, I may notice a certain idea or metaphor in a text, which reminds me of something someone else has written a hundred years before. Is it possible they knew about the earlier text? Is there evidence they were acquainted with it (directly or indirectly)? Similarly I may notice something in a text which reminds me of something which somebody said much later. Is there any evidence of influence? Is a comparison anachronistic? Did the author of the passage I’m reading know about another influential essay or tract on the same topic pubished a couple of decades earlier? Knowing what someone read gives us a sense of where they are coming from, gives us a sense of the contours of what Gadamer would call their Horizont, their ‘horizon’.

Large scale collaborative research in the humanities does not always make sense. Many academics may feel that they scarcely have time apart from teaching and admin to do their own research (writing books, etc), let alone big research projects with people with whom they do not know, and whose work may be only approximately or tangentially related to their own. Certainly people sitting on research funding councils and so on should be careful not to unreflectingly promote collaborative research models in arts and humanities disciplines from other research areas, for example in the sciences, where large scale collaboration is ubiquitous or necessary. That said, I do think that a lot of meta level activities – such as creating and maintaining comprehensive bibliographies – are more suited to being undertaken by large communities of scholars working in collaboration, rather than by lone experts in isolation. Mapping influence in intellectual history is arguably an endeavour where it is desirable to have as much input as possible from as many pairs of eyes as possible.

How might we get started? How can we enable collaboration between scholars to start systematically mapping influence between different writers? To start with we have an increasing amount of freely reusable information about authors and works, e.g. open data from the British Library, the Library of Congress and elsewhere. These can often tell us who wrote what, and the dates of publication of work, and the birth/death dates of authors. Building on this, we could create a basic tool which enable scholars to create new relations between these basic elements, and to explore those relations.

Ideally one would want to have a minimal number of these relations, and for each of these to be as well formed and unambiguous as possible, and each able to be substantiated with some kind of textual reference. E.g. rather than having ‘author X was influenced by author Y’ or ‘author X was aware of author Y’ one would want to break these down into very simple, concrete things like:

• Work A quotes from Work B
• Work A cites Work B
• Work A alludes to author X
• etc

One could even imagine using other sources (library lending data, lecture lists, reading lists, catalogues, letters, notes and other sources) to try to systematically establish things like:

• Author X corresponded with author Y
• Author X met author Y
• Author X was taught by author Y
• Author X attended lectures on author Y
• Author X possessed a copy of work A
• Author X borrowed book A from a library
• etc

This kind of tool would have to be used with a good measure of caution, to ensure one does not:

• Shoehorn one’s interpretation of influence into a certain pre-defined (and to a certain degree, arbitrary) scheme. Hence the first cluster of relations may be more solid start than the second, which are a bit more tentative.
• Take this kind of data as anything other than a very rough guide, an initial basic reference pointing scholars to further sources and citations, which should be interpreted carefully. As I blogged about recently , I don’t think guidance from digital tools will replace immersion in a given domain any time soon!

The image above is from Timothy Stotz, and shows teacher-student relationships between artists, 1435-1935

Of course new technologies may change our modus operandi, and may alter the kinds of research we do. For example the (arguably disproportionate) dominance of the monograph and the article as the sole legitimate ‘units’ of contribution to scholarship in the humanities, may be challenged as digital tools make it easier to share annotations and micro observations, and to create vibrant, dynamic, living conversations around texts and topics. Technology will make it easier for us to traffic in small things like footnotes, asides, linkages, and momentary reflections in addition to the big things, like five-hundred page theses or multi-volume Festschriften.

But I strongly suspect that many of the core virtues of scholarship will remain the same. We may have tools and technologies to help us out with things which were previously a lot more laborious such as creating comprehensive concordances, searching for the occurrence of a certain name in literary Nachlässe, collaborating more easily and more effectively and so on. Lone researchers will be able to do things which perhaps in the past could only be undertaken by large teams of researchers over decades. But these tools and technologies will predominantly be there to support the creation of interesting insights and interpretations, hypotheses and meditations, to support scholars in continuing doing things which they have been doing for centuries.

If we can compare scholarship to walking around in the countryside, then perhaps digital tools are like satellite navigation systems. They can help us plan routes and get a big picture of where we are, but they are no substitute for direct acquaintance, or years of immersion. A good scholar will still have an intimate knowledge of the landscape: which part of the river dries out in the summer, the way that that tree has grown over time, where that stile crosses the path, the way to lift the gate on its hinge to make it turn more easily, the way the path slopes down the hill, and so forth.