| Forschungszentrum Gotha, Max-Weber-Kolleg, Forschung, Veranstaltungen

Workshop "Digital Prosopography: The Case of Natural Law"

The "Research Network for Early Modern Natural Law" (Forschungsstelle für Frühneuzeitliches Naturrecht”), a joint institution of the Max-Weber-Kolleg and the Gotha Research Centre of the University of Erfurt, invites all interested parties to an online workshop entitled "Digital Prosopography: The Case of Natural Law" on 2-3 November.

The “Forschungsstelle für Frühneuzeitliches Naturrecht” has fostered a new digital humanities tool in the form of a database for natural law: Natural Law 1625-1850: Database. The database has been developed by Dr. Mikkel Munthe Jensen and was launched last autumn. It is now in the process of being populated with data through contributions by the members of the international network on “Natural Law 1625-1850”, itself a long-standing collaboration between IZEA (Halle) and MWK.

The joint MWK-FZG workshop organised by the "Forschungsstelle für Frühneuzeutliches Naturrecht" supports the database through discussion of materials for ten profiles of natural lawyers. The meeting will map further developments of the database and conduct a general discussion of the working of this digital tool. These tasks raise major theoretical themes: Where are we at with the question of biography in historical research after half a generation’s resurgence of the genre? What is the status of knowledge-organisation that is subject to continuous online revision? To what extent is digitised knowledge provision dependent on a syntactical stability that itself is ahistorical? Or is the digital malleability of our own interpretative idiom exactly a means of historicising this idiom? How may digital historiography impact network research and reception history? The general discussion will be stimulated through an evening lecture by Dr. Hans Erich Bödeker (Göttingen) on “Die intellektuelle Biographie als Fallstudie”.

Registration: The meeting is free and open for all interested, but we ask you to register by e-mail to Dr. Mikkel Munthe Jensen: mikkel.jensen@uni-erfurt.de. Participants will then receive a corresponding access link.