Horizons of interest: The geographical scope of knowledge in early modern chronicles (1500- 1850) – A Connected World?

Europe’s worldwide networks came into being in the early modern period (c. 1500-1800). Commercial and military activities across the world were both accompanied and precipitated by an information revolution. The use of printed news media filtered down into local chronicles: hand written narratives that recorded local politics but also regional and international events. The question this project wishes to answer is in what way the geographical scope of the chroniclers’ access to information and news changed in the period 1500-1850. In order to study the spatial connectedness of the chroniclers’ worlds, this project will apply Linked Data technology to map and compare the places, people, and dates mentioned in these chronicles over time. As a starting point, we will use the corpus of the project Chronicling Novelty, which consists of about 300 recently digitised chronicles in Dutch from the period 1500-1850. In a previous project, supported by the Network Institute, we developed a pipeline for filtering and normalising historical toponyms. In this project we will apply existing semantic tools to enrich the mentioned locations, names and dates with identifiers from the Linked Open Data Cloud, and then query and analyse the data.