*This post was first published on the Recipes Project on 13 December 2018*

By Ruben Verwaal and Marieke Hendriksen

Ruben Verwaal is curator of the historical collections at Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam, and at the Museum for Communication in The Hague. He obtained his PhD in June 2018 with a thesis on the role of bodily fluids in eighteenth-century chemistry. Marieke Hendriksen is a researcher on the Artechne Project and PI at the Art DATIS Project at Utrecht University and a long-time contributor to The Recipes Project. She specializes in the material culture of science and art in the long eighteenth century. Ruben and Marieke share an obsession with an eighteenth-century object that has since disappeared: a small chemical furnace. In a previous post, they wrote about reconstructing Boerhaave’s little furnace. Now they have two…

In August of this year, we wrote about our first attemptto recreate Boerhaave’s little furnace from old coal stoves. Meanwhile, Marieke’s dad, André, who is a skilled carpenter, was building a furnace from scratch, using Boerhaave’s description and a nineteenth-century example of a Boerhaave furnace in the collection of Museum Gouda as his guidelines. This resulted in a sturdy furnace of solid dried oak, much larger than the furnace we created from coal stoves.

The interesting thing about Boerhaave’s furnace is that many of the experiments that he described in his chemistry book, the Elementa Chemiae, for which the furnace can be used, required a very moderate degree of heat – one could say a cool rather than a hot oven. Two examples we mentioned previously were the distillation of rosemary, and the hatching of eggs, which Boerhaave said he believed his furnace could be used for too. The kind of egg is not specified, but for chicken eggs, the ideal temperature for hatching is 37,6 Celsius. Could we attain that temperature with our furnaces?

Boerhaave advised to use glowing coals or Dutch turf as fuel, with which a constant and moderate heat should be achieved that could be kept up to 24 hours. As turf is no longer won in the Netherlands, we started with some ordinary barbeque coals – and indeed managed to establish a fairly constant heat of around 30 Celsius in the large oven for an hour or so. But coals did not hatch any chicks.

Suspecting that turf may give better results, we set out to buy turf, which is still won in regions in Germany and Ireland. It turned out to be surprisingly difficult to buy in the Netherlands though. Eventually we managed to purchase a box of Irish turf through the American website of the online retailer we love to hate – but it took eight weeks (!) to arrive.  Though our cool oven still hasn’t incubated a chicken, the first results look promising.

Meanwhile, we started thinking about the experiments we’d like to recreate once we had all necessary materials. Since Ruben wrote his PhD thesis about bodily fluids, he is keen on reconstructing an experiment with milk from different mammals. Preferably, we’d compare the effects of prolonged mild heat on cow’s milk and human breast milk. Raw cow’s milk can be purchased at some farms, so Ruben cycled out to get some, while Marieke hesitantly contacted a friend who was pumping to feed her infant daughter to ask if she was willing to donate some of her leftovers to science. Note for future generations: Marieke has the coolest friends – she instantly said yes! For weeks, she gathered the left overs that her daughter did not drink in freezer bags.

Suddenly, it is December, and we have two furnaces, a box of Irish peat, and milk in two freezers. Now we ‘only’ have to make time for this reconstruction experiment… We live an hour apart and this is our pet project, so we’re desperately searching for a couple of days when we can take time of work. It turns out that the most difficult aspect of this reconstruction project is not the building of the furnaces or the sourcing of the necessary materials, but the absence of what Boerhaave obviously did have: cheap labour in the form of young assistants, who could take turns keeping the furnaces going day and night. We can only hope that once we do manage to take those days off, the Dutch winter is still as mild as it has been up till now!

This post first appeared on The Recipes Project on 23 August 2018.

By Ruben Verwaal and Marieke Hendriksen

Ruben Verwaal is curator of the historical collections at Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam, and at the Museum for Communication in The Hague. He obtained his PhD in June 2018 with a thesis on the role of bodily fluids in eighteenth-century chemistry. Marieke Hendriksen is a postdoctoral researcher on the Artechne Project at Utrecht University and a long-time contributor to The Recipes Project. She specializes in the material culture of science and art in the long eighteenth century. Ruben and Marieke share an obsession with an eighteenth-century object that has since disappeared: a small chemical furnace.

With the introduction of chemistry into the university curriculum in the late seventeenth century, new practical needs arose for students  such as being able to perform experiments. Would it be possible to build a chemical furnace that provides a gentle heat, yields no smoke, and is safe for students to use? Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738) believed he found the perfect solution in, what came to be called, Boerhaave’s little furnace.

Boerhaave was professor of medicine, botany and chemistry at Leiden University in the early 18th century.[1] Instead of starting with the most difficult experiments with metals and minerals, he was convinced that students were better off when they learned the techniques of through simpler processes, such as distilling leaves and flowers, and fermenting bodily fluids. But most chemical laboratories were equipped with elaborate devices too complicated for freshmen students, who in the eighteenth century could be as young as fourteen. Moreover, the brick-build furnaces were designed to create high temperatures, in which small and delicate materials like rosemary leaves would burn instantly.[2] Boerhaave hence needed a device that was low-cost, user-friendly, and would provide a gentle heat.

A small wooden oven was the answer. Boerhaave claimed he had designed this type of furnace when he himself was studying chemistry in the 1690s. He opened the chapter on instruments in his chemistry textbook with the words: “I shall begin with my simplest furnace; which I invented forty years ago, when I practiced chemistry in no large study, where there was only one little chimney, and where I required several furnaces at once.”[3]

This kind of device was probably inspired by ordinary foot stoves. These little stoves, also known as foot warmers, were very popular in the Dutch Republic. Coming in a wide variety of shapes (square, octagonal, cylinder), these stoves often feature in books and paintings. Filled with glowing coals or peat, women placed the little stoves under their robes or blankets to keep warm.[4] Many foot stoves were equipped with a wire bail handle for lifting and easy transportation. Such stoves were used in carriages, sleighs, at home and in church to keep one’s feet warm. This ordinary foot warmer got new applications too, namely as tea and coffee stove,   and we suspect it was the model for the ‘simplest furnace’ in the Leiden chemical laboratory.

The gentle heat produced by Boerhaave’s small oven proved very useful in performing all kinds of chemical experiments. Take rosemary, for example, the evergreen aromatic shrub. Distilled atop a “violent fire”, it would have been turned to flame, smoke, and ashes. But when rosemary instead was distilled at “summer-heat” (approx. 85º F), the mild operation would instead reveal the most volatile, fragrant and aromatic part of the plant ordinarily exhaled in summer. The same process could be applied to Angelica, basil, and all other aromatic plants.

Boerhaave, in other words, attributed the success of his device to one’s control over gentle heat. Whenever the wooden oven was filled with hot pieces of coal or Dutch turf that was no longer smoking, it established a constant and moderate heat that could be kept up to 24 hours. As such, the instrument was perfect for students to perform all kinds of heating processes and distillations. In fact, he was so excited about this apparatus, that he claimed that “I believe eggs may be hatched by it”.[5]

Was Boerhaave’s little furnace really that user-friendly and effective as he claimed it was? We checked it out by recreating Boerhaave’s stove and performing experiments with it. Check out our next blog to entry to find out whether we succeeded!

References:

[1] More on Boerhaave, see Marieke Hendriksen, “Boerhaave’s Mineral Chemistry and Its Influence on Eighteenth-Century Pharmacy in the Netherlands and England”, Ambix(2018) and Ruben Verwaal, “The Nature of Blood: Debating Haematology and Blood Chemistry in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic”, Early Science and Medicine(2017).

[2] Boerhaave, Elementa Chemiae (Leiden:  Isaac Severinus, 1732), vol 2, experiment 1.

[3] Ibid., vol 1.

[4] Le Francq van Berkhey,Natuurlyke historie van Holland (Amsterdam: Yntema and Tieboel, 1769–1778), vol. 3, 706-707, 1200.

[5] Boerhaave, Elementa Chemiae, vol 1.

This blog first appeared on The Recipes Project on 15 March 2018

When you say indigo, the first thing many people will think of is blue – jeans blue. (Or if you’re me, you’ll think first of a seventeenth-century recipe to make decorative blue prunes from wax with indigo. Occupational deformation.) But historically, indigo has been used in many more ways, and to make more dye colours than just blue, as I recently discovered. Today, most jeans are died using a synthetic blue dye, but indigo dyes, made from some of the over 750 species of the genus Indigofera as well as from some other plants, have been used to dye textiles for at least 6,000 years, while other subspecies of Indigofera were traditionally used as analgesics with anti-inflammatory properties.

The term ‘indigo’ according to the OED started to occur from the sixteenth century onwards in various European languages to denote blue dyes from India (or east Asia more generally), but can now also refer more generally to dyes, violet-blue light, or blue hues. It might be argued that the term only really applies to dyes created from Indigofera subspecies, while it could also be said that indigo is any dye created from plants through the decomposition of the glucoside indican, which exists not merely in the indigo-plant, but in woad and various other plants too.

While on holiday in Luang Prabang, Laos, I took a weaving and dying workshop with Ock Pop Tock, an organization that was established to preserve the traditional Laotian craft of making hand-loomed textiles. There, I discovered that there is more indigo besides Indigofera, and that one indigo plant can give many more dyes than just blue. They also have a wonderful informative website on natural dyes. At Ock Pop Tock, the plant species used to create indigo dyes is Persicaria tinctoria, or long leaf Japanese indigo, a plant indigenous not to Japan but to China, Vietnam, and Laos. Depending on how the leaves are treated, it can be used to create blue, green, black, and mauve.

Using the fresh leaves creates a green dye, fermenting them for at least five days and adding limestone as a mordant gives a blue dye. Traditionally, the Lao believed that the dye was female, and that it fermented because it attracted a male spirit. To coax the spirit, the pots containing the dye would be dressed in a skirt, and a knife placed on top of the lid to ward off evil spirits that could ruin the dye. The fermentation is actually a naturally occurring oxidation process, with atmospheric oxygen as the oxidant. Regular stirring ensures the process continues. The longer the indigo mixture is left to ferment, the darker it turns. If this mixture is boiled, it turns black. Alternatively, a rare indigenous plant, mak bow or bow vine, can be added to the blue dye to create mauve.

As part of the half-day workshop, I got to dye a silk scarf with a dye of my choice. I love green hues and wanted to make a dye from start to finish, so I chose to dye my scarf ‘indigo’ green. This was, apart from some pretty intense pounding of leaves, surprisingly easy. I got to pick freshPersicaria tinctoria leaves in the beautiful garden, washed them, and mashed them vigorously in a mortar for about five minutes. Then I transferred the mashed leaves into a tub, added some cold water and then the raw silk scarf. After kneading the dye into the fabric for a couple of minutes, I could rinse my scarf and hang it to dry. The end result is a beautiful soft green scarf, that is not just a souvenir, but a tangible reminder of the traditional Laotian knowledge about natural dyes preserved and shared at Ock Pop Tock.

*This post first appeared on The Recipes Project Blog on 7 December 2017*

By Marieke Hendriksen

Robert Dossie (1717-1777) was and English apothecary, experimental chemist, and writer. Within just three years, he published three very successful handbooks: The elaboratory laid open (1758) on chemistry and pharmacy for ‘all practitioners of medicine’, Theory and practice of chirurgical pharmacy (1761) for surgeons, and The handmaid to the arts (1758), which taught ‘a perfect knowledge of the Materia Pictoriae’ such as painting, gilding, and japanning. Gibbs (1951, 1953) has written a short overview of Dossie’s life and work, with a focus on his role in the Society of the Arts, but paid no attention to the cohesion of his seemingly divergent work.

Lowengard (2006) has briefly noted that Dossie used a form typical for books about materia medica for his book on the arts, grouping the contents according to techniques employed as well as by the media to which they might be applied, yet his work has never been thoroughly analyzed. Did Dossie indeed transmit a way of structuring and presenting practical knowledge in text from one realm to another? Recipe collections and how-to books before the eighteenth century were often a mixture of medicinal and artisanal recipes and instructions, and the boundaries between medicine, chemistry, and the preparation and application of artist’s materials often so fluid as to be almost non-existent.

Moreover, some earlier printed books on painting and dying techniques did employ the format of a systematic discussion of materials and their preparations, followed by their application, for example Willem Goeree’s 1760 Verlichterie-kunde  What was novel about Dossie’s Handmaid of the Arts though was the combination of this way of presenting practical artisanal knowledge, his attempt to be encyclopaedic in his collection – listing the uses of the same base materials in the production of various artistic and decorative objects, and his very intentional use of the term ‘Materia Pictoriae’.

The latter appears to have been an attempt to subtly elevate the status of the visual and decorative arts by paralleling the materia pictoriae to the materia medica. Finally, the intended audience gives us more insight in how Dossie understood his own work. From the preface of the book, it appears that Dossie did not so much aim at the people creating visual and decorative objects, but at the professional preparers of artist’s materials, of whom he wrote: “a much greater share of knowledge in natural history, experimental philosophy, and chymistry, is required to the understanding the nature of the simples [sic], and principles of the composition, in a speculative light, than is consistent with the study of other subjects more immediately necessary to an artist.” (p. vii-viii)

In eighteenth-century England, high street chemists and druggists were evolving from preparers and sellers of chemical substances to compounders, stockists, and sellers of drugs and dispensers of medical advice, and it is in this light that Dossie’ work and his division between materia medica and materia pictorial must be seen. Did Dossie intentionally and successfully adapt and implement formats and language traditionally used in one field (medicine) for the organization and transmission of practical knowledge in text to others (chemistry and the arts)? To me it appears that in his mind, materia medica and materia pictoriae were both branches on the tree of chemistry, and that his corpus, which we now tend to see as divergent, was actually a cohesive body of work to him and his contemporaries.

 

Dupré, Sven, ed. Laboratories of Art : Alchemy and Art Technology from Antiquity to the 18th Century. Archimedes 37. Cham [u.a.]: Springer, 2014.

Gibbs, F.W. “Robert Dossie (1717–77) A Further Bibliographical Note.” Annals of Science 9, no. 2 (1953): 191–93.

Gibbs, F.W.  “Robert Dossie (1717–1777) and the Society of Arts.” Annals of Science 7, no. 2 (1951): 149–72.

Lowengard, Sarah. The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Columbia University Press, 2006. http://www.gutenberg-e.org/lowengard/C_Chap05.html.

Worling, Peter M. ‘Pharmacy in the Early Modern World, 1617 to 1841 AD’, in Making Medicines: A Brief History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals, ed. by Stuart Anderson (London: Pharmaceutical Press, 2005), pp. 57–76.

 

 

*This blog was originally published on The ARTECHNE Project Blog on 26 September 2017*

By Marieke Hendriksen

The terms ‘technique’ and ‘technical’ are used widely in relation to art, art history and science today, both to refer to the technical analysis of artworks and to a more holistic analysis of creative processes. Yet we do not have a history of the shifting meanings of the term ‘technique’ in the arts and sciences. The word ‘technique’ was a neologism in the vernacular, and started to appear in treatises on arts and sciences from the middle of the eighteenth century. Rooted in the Greek techne, which was translated routinely as ‘art’ until the mid-eighteenth century, technique referred to processes of making or doing and their products. Such processes had been described to previously as ‘art’, ‘methods’, ‘manners’ or ‘mechanics’ in the vernacular, and they were recorded in text with the intention of documenting and/or transmitting practical skills and knowledge.

On 26 and 27 October, Sven Dupré and I are hosting an international workshop at Utrecht University with the aim of bridging the gap between the changing concept of technique and the practices currently described by it. Questions we seek to answer are for example: how was what we now call ‘technique’ in the arts and sciences described and understood before the term took hold? More specifically, how were techniques in the arts described between 1500 and 1900? What kind of written sources can we distinguish, which terms were used to describe and instruct technique in various languages, and who were the intended audiences of these works?

Moreover, we will look at the linguistic history of technique in the arts, with questions such as why the term ‘technique’ first emerged around 1750, and what did it mean initially to artists, art theorists, and natural philosophers? Is there a connection with the emergence of categories such as aesthetics, fine art, craft, mechanics, and technology? Did the meaning of ‘technique’ and related concepts vary between periods, practices, and European languages, and how can we use data and concept mining to understand this? What do we mean by ‘technique’ in relation to art now, and can we use the same word to describe historical knowledge and practices?

Another issue closely related to the understanding of the concept of ‘technique’ in the arts is the development of so-called somatic language. Somatic language to describe measurements and sensory characteristics of materials traditionally played an important role in technical art texts, but seems to become rarer or more standardized over time. This kind of language guides the reader’s posture, as well as the use of their own body, and tools and materials, yet it is often unspecific and metaphorical (‘shift your weight’, ‘a handful’, ‘like yoghurt’), and meanings and interpretation can vary wildly in different languages, times, and cultures. How did the use of this kind of somatic language change in Europe between 1500 and 1950? What was the influence of standardization on conservation practices?

During the workshop, we will discuss these and related questions in panels of specialists from a variety of fields, such as history, art history, intellectual history, philosophy, and linguistics. Each interdisciplinary panel will focus on a particular concept, but there will also be ample time for exchange between the various panels.

Limited seating is available, please contact j.briggeman@uu.nl if you are interested in attending.  

*This blog was originally published on The ARTECHNE Project Blog on 9 March 2017*

A travel grant from the Wood Institute at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia recently allowed me to do research in their library and archives. Established in 1786, the College holds a wonderful collection of manuscripts and printed works. As I am particularly interested in the transmission of art technical knowledge in the long eighteenth century between medical men and people we would now describe as artists or craftsmen, I started looking for connections between such people in Philadelphia. I did not have to search long, for Philadelphia in 1800 had a population of only 41,220, but it was a fast-growing trading hub with two medical colleges, and an art academy was about to be established. This meant that many Philadelphians in the middle and upper classes knew each other personally – some were even related.

Philadelphia-born William Rush had started his career as a carver of ship figureheads, learning the trade from his father and the famous Edward Cutbush. He was one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (est. 1805), and from the early nineteenth century onwards, he created a number of sculptures for public places in Philadelphia. Caspar Wistar (1761-1818), professor of chemistry and the institutes of medicine at the College of Philadelphia, was a skilled maker of anatomical preparations and models, which he created by injecting organs with wax. However, when the number of students attending his classes greatly increased in the early decades of the nineteenth century, he decided he needed something more dramatic as a teaching aid: enlarged models of human anatomy, which would be visible even at the back rows. Realizing that this surpassed his own modelling skills, he turned to Rush, who made at least twenty models for him.

As is so often the case when people are physically close, no primary written records –such as letters- remain of this collaboration between Wistar and Rush. However, their collaboration shows that there were strong connections between medical men and visual artists and craftsmen in Philadelphia around 1800. It is likely that Wistar and Rush already knew each other before they started working together. Not only was Philadelphia’s population fairly small, William Rush was a full cousin of a colleague of Wistar’s, the famous Philadelphian physician and professor of chemistry Benjamin Rush (1746-1813). Moreover, Wistar came from a family of craftspeople himself: his grandfather and namesake (1696 –1752) was a German-born

glassmaker. Both Benjamin Rush and Caspar Wistar studied in Edinburgh, and the latter corresponded with Thomas Pole, a fellow Quaker and the Philadelphia-born author of the 1790 The Anatomical Instructor, a handbook that describes, amongst others, how to make anatomical preparations and models from a variety of materials – although wood was not one of them.

So although in this case there is no evidence that Wistar taught Rush anatomy or that Rush taught Wistar practical skills for model making, it is clear that they must have been very aware of each other’s knowledge and skills, and it is rather unlikely that they never learned anything from each other. In any case, Rush successfully transmitted his technique from one discipline to another: from artistic sculpting to anatomical model making.

*This blog originally appeared on the Recipes Project on 9 March 2017*

By Marieke Hendriksen

Having written a book on eighteenth-century anatomical collections, I know a thing or two about historical techniques for preserving (parts of) the human body. As I am interested in natural history collections more generally, I also did some research on the preservation of animal bodies, and even took a taxidermy course myself. However, recently I realised that the preservation of human and animal bodies were historically even closer connected than I had imagined. Yet ideas about which parts of the human body could and should be preserved, and how, diverged greatly, particularly when it comes to skin, or taxidermy. Taxidermy, from the Greek τάξις (taxis) and  δέρμα (derma – I am adding those for people who may not read Greek script), literally means ‘the arranging of skin’.

There are a few known cases of attempts to preserve human skins in their entirety before 1800 – for example, there was a human skin in the Leiden anatomical theatre in the seventeenth century – but that wasn’t stuffed, and such attempts appear to have been altogether unsuccessful. If human skin was preserved, it was mostly small pieces, which were used to study things like skin colour and structure, tattoos, or pathologies. By the end of the eighteenth century, the preservation of an entire human skin in a lifelike pose was of little interest to anatomists. Normal internal anatomy would be studied through dissection and the creation of preparations and skeletons, and pathologies of the skin could be preserved by making preparations of small sections of skin. As healthy skin can be studied perfectly easily in live subjects, there was little reason to pursue the taxidermy of man. This is reflected in anatomical handbooks like Thomas Pole’s 1790 Anatomical Instructor (reprinted in 1813), which gave detailed directions for numerous methods to preserve parts of the human and animal body, including entire heads and foetuses, but did not say anything about how to preserve only skin. On the contrary, Pole advised to remove the cuticle from a head that was to be preserved,  as this would give ‘a brightness to the complexion’.[1]

However, with the growing popularity of taxidermy – the mounting of animal skins in lifelike poses – and the rise of physical anthropology in the early nineteenth century, there were a number of experiments with human taxidermy, the most famous of which was probably Jeremy Bentham’s unsuccessful attempt to have his body made into an ‘auto-icon’ after this death. Then there was ‘el negro’ or ‘the negro of Banyoles’, whose faith was described by Dutch author Frank Westerman in his 2004 book El Negro en ik (‘El negro and I’). The remains of this young African San man were stuffed by two taxidermists, the French Verreaux brothers, in the 1830s, and remained on display in a local Museum in Banyoles, Spain, until 1997. Eventually his remains were send for burial in Botswana in 2000. Jules Pierre (1807-1837) and Jean Baptiste Édouard (1810-1868) Verreaux created taxidermy specimens of exotic animals for their father’s Parisian shop in natural historical objects, Maison Verreaux, and, as ‘el negro’ shows, used human bones for his models.

For a long time, ‘el negro’ was the only known case of nineteenth-century human taxidermy. However, a recent discovery suggests that the Verreaux brothers used human remains more frequently. In 2016, a human skull was discovered in a mannequin that was part of an ensemble made by the Verreaux studio. Formerly known as “Arab Courier Attacked by Lions”, it was restored and returned to display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh under the title “Lion Attacking a Dromedary”. Although apparently no attempt was made to use human skin in the Pittsburgh diorama, these cases show that there was little reticence when it came to using human materials for taxidermy displays in the nineteenth century, particularly when the human in question was considered ‘exotic’. This is supported by the fact that a popular contemporary taxidermy manual, aimed specifically at museums and travelers, opened with a paragraph on the impossibility of applying taxidermy to man successfully. The book, written by the naturalist Sarah Bowdich (née Wallis, later Lee, 1791-1856) saw six editions – the first in 1820, the last in 1843.

After listing the necessary tools and giving a number of recipes for the cleansing and preservation fluids used in taxidermy, Bowdich opened the section on ‘the preparation of mammalia’ with a somewhat disappointed-sounding statement:

1. Of man 

All the efforts of man to restore the skin of his fellow creature to its natural form and beauty, have hitherto been fruitless: the trials which have been made have only produced mis-shapen, hideous objects, and so unlike nature, that they have never found a place in our collections. 

Bowdich went on to discuss the life-like wet preparations made by Amsterdam anatomist Frederik Ruysch (1638  – 1731) as ‘without doubt (…) very useful to science’, before switching to a description of a more successful practice – the preservation of skeletons. Given the tragic history of ‘el negro’ and many other violently obtained human remains in museum collections, it is a cold comfort that the naturalists of the nineteenth century failed at the taxidermy of their ‘fellow creature’.

[1] Pole, Thomas. The Anatomical Instructor ; or an Illustration of the Modern and Most Approved Methods of Preparing and Preserving the Different Parts of the Human Body and of Quadrupeds by Injection, Corrosion, Maceration, Distention, Articulation, Modelling, &C. London: Couchman & Fry, 1790: p.84.

Over the past few months, I have started exploring the many possibilities offered by Digital Humanities technologies. Digital humanities ‘can be described as a set of conceptual and practical approaches to digital engagement with cultural materials’, as this excellent online resource from UCLA puts it. Another excellent resource for historians to learn more about digital tools and techniques is Adam Crymble’s ‘The Programming Historian.’ One of the things I find most fascinating is the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to represent historical data. While keeping in mind that maps are always distorted in some way, entering historical data about events, people, and dates into a GIS application can visualize connections and networks that are otherwise difficult to grasp.

For example, the ‘Knowledge circulation in the 17th century’ project in the Netherlands gives insight not only in the content of correspondence of seventeenth-century philosophers, but also in the network it formed. Something similar is done in Stanford University’s ‘Republic of Letters’ project. There are countless other examples, but one thing many of these projects have in common is a substantial professional team of developers, creating the technical infrastructure that humanities researchers then fill with their data.

However, there are possibilities for individual researchers without a big budget too. Many universities will offer their students and employees an online GIS course free of charge, and the development of open source software offers new opportunities. Here is an example of how a research group used open source application QGIS to create maps for their research on Burgundy’s historical landscape.

Even if you do not want to download software -or if your laptop cannot handle it- there are possibilities. Last week, I experimented a bit with the experimental data visualization web application Google Fusion Tables, which allows you to create online maps and tables from your own data. Of course this becomes more interesting when you have a big dataset, but just to see the effect I entered the sites of experimentation I described in a recent paper, “Anatomical Mercury: Changing Understandings of Quicksilver, Blood, and the Lymphatic System, 1650–1800.”

This resulted in an online map and a pie chart showing the geographical spread of experiments using mercury to trace the lymphatic system in the period 1650-1800. Even with this ridiculously small dataset, you get an overview that is impossible to obtain from the paper so fast. Of course, there is much to object: Google (for now at least) mainly contains contemporary maps, although historical imagery is being added as we speak.

Moreover, I’m still trying to figure out if there is a way to connect datapoints and thus visualize interactions and networks in Fusion Tables. Used with such a small dataset the application only produces an interesting illustration – this did not provide any new insights. Still, this is only a first try. I have just installed QGIS and hope to use it to gain new insights from my research data in the near future.

Do you already use digital humanities methods or GIS in your historical research? What are your experiences?