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Images present in paper for CSDH 2020 but available here as reference.

“The Culture of Curiosity Project” studies the discourse and cultural context of early modern collections of rarities and curiosities in England and Scotland, 1580-1700. Central to this research is the Digital Ark, a web archive of some fifty XML-encoded catalogues, inventories, and records of these collections. Our focus in phase two of this programme of research, “The Social Network of Early Modern Collectors of Curiosities,” is the social network of collection: the people who facilitated the creation, manipulation, and exchange of objects and how they acquired them (gifts, purchases, discoveries, etc.). In tracing these events of exchange, we will ask such questions as: Who were the people involved in these collecting networks? What was their relationship to these objects, and their roles in the production, acquisition, and exchange of these objects? Moreover, what does all this tell us about the function of collected objects in the cultural and intellectual practices of these social networks? To answer these questions, we are modelling and developing new applications of computer-assisted network visualization to our textual materials related to these collections. In doing so, we want to bring the object to the fore of our analysis.