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This work describes a computational method for reconstructing clusters of social relationships among early modern printers and publishers, the most determinant agents for the process of transformation of scientific knowledge. The method is applied to a dataset retrieved from the Sphaera corpus, a collection of 359 editions of textbooks used at European universities and produced between the years 1472 and 1650. The method makes use of standard bibliographic data and fingerprints; social relationships are defined as “awareness relationships”. The historical background is constituted of the production and economic practices of early modern printers and publishers in the academic book market. The work concludes with empirically validating historical case studies, their historical interpretation, and suggestions for further improvements by utilizing machine learning technologies.

In the present work we show how many scientific illustrations of the early modern period can be used to track the evolution of visual knowledge and to detect historical communities involved in the production of the editions analyzed. In particular, we define three sorts of historically meaningful similarities among scientific illustrations, we show how such illustrations can be extracted from the sources and then clustered by means of fully computer-based methods, and finally we conclude with an example to show the potential of our approach.

The Sphere project stands at the intersection of the humanities and information sciences. The project aims to better understand the evolution of knowledge in the early modern period by studying a collection of 359 textbook editions published between 1472 and 1650 which were used to teach geocentric cosmology and astronomy at European universities. The relatively large size of the corpus at hand presents a challenge for traditional historical approaches, but provides a great opportunity to explore such a large collection of historical data using computational approaches. In this paper, we present a review of the different computational approaches, used in this project over the period of the last three years, that led to a better understanding of the dynamics of knowledge transfer and transformation in the early modern period.

Recent advances in object detection facilitated by deep learning have led to numerous solutions in a myriad of fields ranging from medical diagnosis to autonomous driving. However, historical research is yet to reap the benefits of such advances. This is generally due to the low number of large, coherent, and annotated datasets of historical documents, as well as the overwhelming focus on Optical Character Recognition to support the analysis of historical documents. In this paper, we highlight the importance of visual elements, in particular illustrations in historical documents, and offer a public multi-class historical visual element dataset based on the

The ultimate objective of this work is to demonstrate that it is possible to reconsider the emergence of modern science as a process of disintegration of the quadrivium, which was considered a stable scheme for the organization of knowledge. The argument considers the quadrivium according to the Boethian systematization that was used to organize the curricula of the late medieval universities. This argument follows the development of each of its disciplines and illustrates the practical turn they underwent. The period between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries is explored, and shows that during this period, the quadrivium potentially included a fifth autonomous discipline, calendric. The article concludes by describing epistemological considerations to the mechanisms of disintegration of knowledge structures.

This article outlines the state of digital perspectives in historical research, some of the methods and tools in use by digital historians, and the possible or even necessary steps in the future development of the digital approach. We begin by describing three main computational approaches: digital databases and repositories, network analysis, and Machine Learning. We also address data models and ontologies in the larger context of the demand for sustainability and linked research data. The section is followed by a discussion of the (much needed) standards and policies concerning data quality and transparency. We conclude with a consideration of future scenarios and challenges for computational research.

Paratexts, such as dedication letters or epigrams, in early modern printed books can be used by historians to situate a book’s production in its institutional and social context. We depart from the general assumption that two publishers or printers were in a relation of awareness of each other if they printed and put on the market two different editions that contain at least one identical paratext. In this paper, we analyze the circulation of the paratexts among the 359 editions of the “Sphaeracorpus.” First, we discuss the available data, the conditions to build a social network, and the latter’s characteristics. Second, we interpret the results—potential relationships among printers and publishers—from a historical point of view and, at the same time, discuss the sorts of potential relationships that this method can disclose. Third, we corroborate the historical results among different approaches, namely by using editions’ fingerprints and by investigating the book production of those printers and publishers tangentially involved in relevant relationships, but who fall outside the “Sphaeracorpus.” Finally, we identify local communities of printers and publishers and, on a transregional level, printers, and publishers who were observing and influencing each other.

In this article, we present a method for identifying image reuse in a corpus of 358 books printed between the 15th and 17th century. The approach is based on image hashing, an established method for finding near duplicates of images. Our historical interpretation of the method’s result produces two important insights hinting at a radical material and epistemological change taking place around 1530. We then evaluate the image hash approach against a method that employs a neural network for image recognition.

Recent advances in object detection facilitated by deep learning have led to numerous solutions in a myriad of fields ranging from medical diagnosis to autonomous driving. However, historical research is yet to reap the benefits of such advances. This is generally due to the low number of large, coherent, and annotated datasets of historical documents, as well as the overwhelming focus on Optical Character Recognition to support the analysis of historical documents. In this paper, we highlight the importance of visual elements, in particular illustrations in historical documents, and offer a public multi-class historical visual element dataset based on the Sphaera corpus. Additionally, we train an image extraction model based on YOLO architecture and publish it through a publicly available web-service to detect and extract multi-class images from historical documents in an effort to bridge the gap between traditional and computational approaches in historical studies.

We investigated the evolution and transformation of scientific knowledge in the early modern period, analyzing more than 350 different editions of textbooks used for teaching astronomy in European universities from the late fifteenth century to mid-seventeenth century. These historical sources constitute the Sphaera Corpus. By examining different semantic relations among individual parts of each edition on record, we built a multiplex network consisting of six layers, as well as the aggregated network built from the superposition of all the layers. The network analysis reveals the emergence of five different communities. The contribution of each layer in shaping the communities and the properties of each community are studied. The most influential books in the corpus are found by calculating the average age of all the out-going and in-coming links for each book. A small group of editions is identified as a transmitter of knowledge as they bridge past knowledge to the future through a long temporal interval. Our analysis, moreover, identifies the most impactful editions. These books introduce new knowledge that is then adopted by almost all the books published afterwards until the end of the whole period of study. The historical research on the content of the identified books, as an empirical test, finally corroborates the results of all our analyses.

Many learning algorithms such as kernel machines, nearest neighbors, clustering, or anomaly detection, are based on the concept of 'distance' or 'similarity'. Before similarities are used for training an actual machine learning model, we would like to verify that they are bound to meaningful patterns in the data. In this paper, we propose to make similarities interpretable by augmenting them with an explanation in terms of input features. We develop BiLRP, a scalable and theoretically founded method to systematically decompose similarity scores on pairs of input features. Our method can be expressed as a composition of LRP explanations, which were shown in previous works to scale to highly nonlinear functions. Through an extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate that BiLRP robustly explains complex similarity models, e.g. built on VGG-16 deep neural network features. Additionally, we apply our method to an open problem in digital humanities: detailed assessment of similarity between historical documents such as astronomical tables. Here again, BiLRP provides insight and brings verifiability into a highly engineered and problem-specific similarity model., Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures

By way of introduction to the present volume, a corpus of 359 treatises is described that was used in early modern educational institutions for introductory classes on cosmology and that is referenced by the following contributions. Following a taxonomy of early modern commentaries, central characteristics are analyzed in detail such as the rate of production of the treatises, the places where they were produced, and their various languages and formats. The focus then turns to the balance between the temporal dynamics of production of the treatises and the lifespans of their commentators. This reveals how the early modern textbooks first amplified medieval scientific knowledge and only slowly began to support and spread the echoes of scientific debate among contemporary scholars. The institutional and intellectual profiles of the commentary authors are then described on the basis of the results presented in the contributions to this volume. The commentators are described by referring on one hand to their relations to the universities, religious orders, and commercial institutions, and on the other to their engagement with disciplines both inside and outside the conceptual framework of the quadrivium. Finally, a quantitative summary of the results achieved by this volume is presented along with outlines for future research endeavors that will focus, consequently, on the role of the printers and publishers of the same commentaries.

Conrad Tockler, alias Noricus, was a university professor in Leipzig at the beginning of the sixteenth century and Rector magnificus of the university from 1512 on. He was a physician adept at astrological medicine and was also a fairly skilled mathematician. His publication list begins in 1502 with a Libellus de sole, a commented reprint of Marsilius Ficinus’s homonimous work. Tockler also authored two different commented editions of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de sphaera. In his view, cosmological knowledge was directly connected with his medical activities via astrology.The paper reconstructs the intellectual context in which Tockler was active with the aim to understand how much he can be considered innovative, or whether he was in truth a late expression of an already declining late Medieval knowledge system that unified astronomy, astrology, and medicine in form of a structure pivoted around cosmological knowledge.

The chapter is concerned with the epistemic structures of mechanical knowledge in its historical transformations. It describes these structures using the concept of mental models as cognitive instruments, which function as mediators between the realm of practice and experience on the one hand, and conceptual systems on the other. With the help of the concept of mental model, the chapter discusses how mechanical knowledge has emerged from experience in practical contexts and how it was transformed into theoretical and mathematically formalized knowledge systems. Focusing on one particular mental model, which describes the cognitive structure conceptualizing motion as being caused by forces, the chapter then follows its transformations in the long-term history of mechanical thinking. This so-called “motion-implies-force” model is rooted in intuitive, non-written mechanical knowledge. Over the course of history, the model was recruited, complemented, and transformed in the context of the use of mechanical tools and articulated in the work of practitioners dealing with machines, arms, ships, buildings, fortifications, and the like. Eventually, under specific cultural circumstances, this and other mental models were elaborated and integrated into mathematically formalized systems that were used, for example, in the explanation of terrestrial and celestial motions in early modern natural philosophy and the mathematical disciplines of European universities.

The Nature of Pre-Classical Mechanics Jurgen Renn, Matthias Schemmel, Matteo Valleriani 2. Institutions, Discourses, Correspondence Networks in the Era of Pre-Classical Mechanics Rivka Feldhay and Michael Elazar Case Studies 1. New Science in Galileo's New Science of Motion Jochen Buttner 2. A Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Cosmology and the Centrobaric Theory from Antiquity to the Renaissance ElioNenci 3. A Treatise on Galileian Mechanics: The Exercitationes in Mechanicis Aristotelis (1634) by the Jesuits Giovan Battista Zupi Romano Gatto 4. Heaviness and Lightness in the 17th Century: A Jesuit Perspective Rivka Feldhay and Ayeletibn Ezra 5. Jesuit Post-Galilean Conceptions of Impetus: Honore Fabri, Paolo Casati, and Francesco Eschinardi Rivka Feldhay and Michael Elazar

The essay focuses on the early modern tradition of commentaries on the late Medieval work of Johannes de Sacrobosco, Tractatus de sphaera. Arguing that a new knowledge system founded on the geocentric worldview emerged during the thirteenth century, the work analyzes how and why such a knowledge system changed during the early modern period in correlation with the development of practical knowledge, which emerged in the framework of the phenomenon of journeys of exploration. It is shown that new subjects were added to the original texts and finally codified and printed in the early modern editions of the text, thus creating new structures of knowledge. By applying methods derived from social network analysis, the essay finally examines how a single new subject, namely a mathematical demonstration concerning the division of the Earth’s surface into climate zones, entered the history of commentary treatises on the Sphere and how it spread over time and space by being adopted into further editions published in other places and by different printers. By means of this case study, this work concludes with the analysis of the process that leads from one abstract structure of knowledge to the next.

The relation between practical and theoretical knowledge, which is usually perceived as one of the motors of scientific development in the early modern period, is redefined here as the relation between different structures of knowledge, where the qualitative difference between the different structures is specified according to the degree of abstraction and the range of connections between the different fields of knowledge. The investigation begins by identifying practical knowledge and the continuous process of its reorganization into new structures. In this way, the research aims to understand how the transfer of practical activities transitioned to a circulation of practical literature and, finally, how codified practical knowledge became part of the theoretical and conceptual structures that were being established during the early modern period. As an introduction to the entire volume, a heuristic diversification of knowledge production mechanisms is defined on three levels: (1) the knowledge structure of practical activities; (2) the social structuring of practical knowledge; and (3) the conceptual structures of knowledge. The subsequent chapters are discussed and introduced according to these definitions.

The paper aims to show how sixteenth century hydraulic and pneumatic engineers appropriated ancient science and technology – codified in the text of Hero of Alexandria’s Pneumatics – to enter into scientific discourse, for instance, with natural philosophers. They drew on the logical structure, content and narrative style passed down from antiquity to generate and codify their own theoretical approach and to document their new technological achievements. They did so by using the form of commented and enlarged editions, just as Aristotelian natural philosophers had been doing for centuries. The argument aims to detail the exact role of ancient science and the process of transformation it underwent during the early modern period. In particular, it aims to show how pneumatic engineers first tested the ancient technology codified by Hero while carrying out their own practical activities. Once these tests were successfully concluded, in the spirit of early modern humanism they finally presented these activities as being associated with the work of their discipline’s most authoritative author, Hero of Alexandria, whose technology was tested during the construction of the hydraulic and pneumatic system of the garden of Pratolino.

The Villa d’Este in Tivoli near Rome was the last building project of Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este and the one that secured him lasting fame. One of its main attractions is the hydraulic organ integrated into a fountain system, called the Fountain of the Organ. This paper points to a source describing the organ’s mechanism that has been ignored until now: Oreste Vannocci Biringucci’s translation of Hero’s Pneumatics, which was commissioned in the course of building pneumatic devices in another famous villa garden, the Medici garden in Pratolino. Hero’s text is followed by a description of the technical apparatus and functioning of Tivoli’s organ, which is published and translated here for the first time. The research is based on two different descriptions of the organ of Tivoli and on a virtual reconstruction of the hydraulic organ built within the scenic reproduction of the legendary Mount Parnassus at the garden of Pratolino. By means of a comparative analysis, it will be shown that the practical experience of Renaissance pneumatic engineers is superior to the knowledge codified in the ancient texts. As a consequence, this work also shows how Renaissance gardens represented the knowledge platform for theoretical and practical knowledge.

Galileo's old friend, the painter and mathematician Ludovico Cardi da Cigoli, wrote from Rome on 24 February 1613 about a rumour that was circulating: someone in Padua had invented an instrument able to "greatly multiply the sense of hearing".1 Da Cigoli asked Galileo for more details. A full five months earlier Galileo's former pupil Daniello Antonini had informed Galileo that Paolo Aproino, another former pupil, had produced something "miraculous" in Treviso near Venice.2 These two events mark the period, 1612-13, when new developments were taking place in the field of acoustics. With epistolary guidance from Galileo, Paolo Aproino was constructing an ear trumpet.Ear trumpets did not first appear at the beginning of the seventeenth century. If the ear trumpet is seen as an enlargement of the ear auricle to improve hearing, then this instrument is as old as the practice of cupping a hand to the ear, or of using perforated seashells with various pipes to extend their range. Thus, to find out why Galileo and Aproino's ear trumpet was considered to be such a novel and even miraculous device is quite a challenge. If the entire seventeenth century is considered, then an investigation becomes even more intriguing, for this period embraces a wealth of inventors of the ear trumpet.At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the ear trumpet was considered to be a product of human art in the Aristotelian sense and thus treated as either the completion of what nature had left unfinished - for instance, a relatively deaf human ear - or as the result of a construction process guided by the principle of imitation of nature.3 By the end of the century, however, the ear trumpet had come to be seen as a mechanical instrument. Its creators ceased to investigate it from the perspective of natural philosophy or to associate it with any natural product.4 The emergence of a new interpretation of the acoustic instrument is immediately connected with the seventeenth-century conflict between two different conceptions of sound: the Aristotelian, based on the concept of sensible quality and violent motion, and the mechanical, based on the analogy between optics and acoustics.Galileo and Aproino's project in acoustics is directly connected to this conflict. Although the project was a success from a technological point of view - Aproino devised a very efficient ear trumpet - they decided to abandon it. To understand why this happened, a brief survey of the history of the ear trumpet will be given in the following. This will show how investigators shifted the instrument from the realm of traditional natural philosophy into the framework of modern mechanics, with the explicit intent to disregard any investigations concerned with the nature of sound and, especially, to focus only on the technical efficiency of the instrument. Parallel to this process of reconfiguration of the acoustic instrument, it will be shown how the Aristotelian conception of sound came to be renounced in favour of a new mechanical interpretation. Finally, Galileo and Aproino's project will be analysed in the context of the dominant conception of sound in the early seventeenth century. And to understand why in the end Galileo and Aproino abandoned the project, the institutional role of the court in scientific practice will be considered. The paper closes with the question of why so many seventeenth-century figures considered themselves to be the first to invent the ear trumpet. This analysis contributes to the understanding of the concept of novelty applied to early modern technology.Translations of the relevant sources are appended at the end of the paper.IMITATION OF NATURE5No doubt, ear trumpets have been in use since time immemorial.6 According to Harald Feldmann,7 Archigenes the famous Roman doctor suggested to Emperor Trajanus, who was hard of hearing, that he use a tuba placed close to the ear. Moreover, funnelshaped objects of bronze with spiral tubes at the narrow end, found close to Pompeii, are thought to have been ear trumpets. …