History

Loved and loathed in equal measures by his contemporaries, the poet, biographer, historian and social and cultural critic Robert Southey (1774-1843) was one of the most public and controversial figures in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. The Collected Letters will make it possible for scholars to access for the first time his complete surviving correspondence.

The aim of the project is to use new technology to present and analyse the tradition of wisdom literatures in Greek and Arabic. Throughout antiquity and the middle ages collections of wise or useful sayings were created and circulated, as a practical response to the cost and inaccessibility of full texts in a manuscript age; the project will focus on those which collected moral and social advice. The compilation of these collections formed a crucial route by which ideas of reasonable behaviour and good conduct were disseminated over a huge area, and over many centuries.

BiographyNet is a multidisciplinary project that combines expertise from history, computer science and computational linguistics. It works with data from the Biography Portal of the Netherlands which links more than 75,000 Dutch people mentioned in various databases, through a limited set of metadata. BiographyNet aims to enhance its potential for historical research by transforming the available data into a semantic knowledge base and through the creation of a demonstrator.