Circulating knowledge through letters: circulating letters through technologiy: the Eastways of Science project

Correspondences are one of the most important sources for a science historian: they shed light upon the origins of new scientific theories; they are a privileged point of view to understand the debates of an age of censorship; last but not least correspondences are necessary instruments to understand that extraordinary phenomenon that was the ideal super-national academy of the 17th century European “scientists”. These are some of the reasons why the letter exchanges kept by the «heroes» of modern science still offer material for monumental edition plans. Anyway, if we consider the scientific correspondences as the main source for mapping boundaries, extension, density, population and roadways of the actual “Republic of sciences”, the editions on paper –even if philologically peerless– are widely insufficient to manage the huge mass of information inferred from letters. Eastways of Science is one of the many projects that nowadays exploit the web-technologies to edit, manage and study such documents. It is a research project co-financed by the European Commission, hosted by the University of Rome La Sapienza and technologically implemented by the Rinascimento Digitale Foundation-Institute and the Museum for the History of Science of Florence. It aims at creating an electronic database that would work as a common repository of letters of scientific-historical interest; a register of the men, women, lecturers, practitioners, patrons, institutions, things etc. involved in such a “Republic” (especially as to Middle-East Europe) in the second half of the 17th Century; a «dynamic» database able to reconstruct the networks of scientific relations that crossed early modern Europe –that is the scientific information flows– making them visible on a geographic map. It focuses on the Academy of the Cimento correspondence, and on its intersections with the epistolaries by Johannes Hevelius and Giovanni Alfonso Borelli. This paper aims at explaining and discussing methodologies, ends and temporary results of the project.