Prof. dr. Wijnand Mijnhardt

Age: 62
Interview: 31.1.2013

Profile

Professor Wijnand Mijnhardt holds a chair in the history after the Middle Ages at Utrecht University, in particular concerning culture, mentalities and ideas 1650-1850. His interest in the intellectual aspects of the past was already initiated by his PhD thesis 'Tot heil van 't menschdom'. Culturele genootschappen in Nederland 1750-1815 (1988). From 2001 to 2004 he was visiting professor Dutch cultural history at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is also director of the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, an interdisciplinary collaboration of all Faculties of this university.

Mijnhardt has extensively published on Dutch and European Enlightment, book culture and book consumption. He is one of the authors of The Book that changed Europe: Picart and Bernard's religious ceremonies of the world, about an early eighteenth century influential comparative study on religious cultures published by Jean Frederic Bernard and illustrated by Bernard Picart. This multi-volume historical work, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, contains hundreds of engravings that sought to capture the ritual and ceremonial life of all the known religions of the world.  

A modern digital facsimile edition of this source is now available in the form of a website with facilities for zooming into details of text and visual material. Intellectual influence is also a major theme in an other project  in which the Descartes Centre is involved: the Circulation of Knowledge. This has brought together a number of correspondences of well-known seventeenth century scholars in a virtual research environment, which allows researchers to explore and analyze the corpus in innovative ways.

View on enhanced publications

Text and image

Wijnand Mijnhardt is a heavy user of ebooks and digitalized sources, but, nevertheless,  has still a great appreciation of printed books, not only for esthetical reasons, but also because the physical historical book reveals in paper quality and in binding a great deal of its original function and usage. On the other hand, in comparison with printed copies, digital books can be far more easily distributed, stored, searched through and analyzed.

Although he fully realizes the importance of visual sources for historical research, for a long time text has taken precedence over image in his work, which was primarily text-based with illustrations added afterwards. His studies have been focused more on the non-physical world of ideas and their social basis, rather than on the material culture. When it came to (digital) publications there was no particular stimulus for ample visual enrichment. However, a study like the growing importance of illustrations since about 1650 would shift the emphasis to visual material and would certainly require techniques of enriched digital publications.

The visual aspect is important at a different level as well: also social study of ideas will produce quantitative results, which are easier to understand through visual representations. Mijnhardt’s background and training in combination with poor information technology support in the academia did not make him an early adopter of data visualization. This is different in current projects such as the Circulation of Knowledge. Here map-based visualizations are used to show the interaction and communication between scholars in the past as deduced from their letters. Interactive exploration and text mining helps to go beyond the text surface, beyond the author’s message manifest in the letter, and to answer the historian’s more penetrating  questions about the mindset of the sender.

A cocitation graph showing persons mentioned together in the same letter. The more often persons are mentioned together, the stronger the connection. Persons central to a debate appear in the center of the graph. Thus, the cocitation graph gives an indication of the intellectual network as pertaining to the current result set.

 

Digital editions and digital research data

Mijnhardt has come to regard information technology as crucial for modern historical research. Unfortunately, he has to note that in this respect the current training of many historians falls short.  Digital methods and techniques are now indispensable for students to gather extensive knowledge of literary history. For example,  a digital edition of eighteenth encyclopedias can quickly reveal the contemporary system knowledge ordering: a user should be able to look up items, together with meta data and related information, and discover what notions are missing and what criteria the authors used for the selection of concepts. Such an overview is hard to obtain by studying the printed original without the modern digtal apparatus.

Ideally, digital editions of historical sources should be open in that sense that newly upcoming information can be integrated with the edited text;  however, here emerges the problem of lack of personnel and funding for maintaining such a system. It would be very welcome if scholarly publications were more regularly accompanied by the underlying dataset, however this should not be a strict requirement.   

Priorities

Mijnhardt considers as most important features of enhanced publications (on equal footing):

1.       Access to metadata and related information concerning the historical text, which also includes annotations and the (interactive) representation of research data, for example, through interactive graphs and charts.

2.       Adequate digital support of visual elements such as the illustrations of historical sources, paintings, engravings etcetera. A user should be able to retrieve and compare them, and preferably, analyze them with the aid special software.

Audio fragments

·         Preferences digital  / printed books (3:47)

·         Primacy of text (1:1)

·         Inadequate training of historians (0:48)

·         Interactive exploration of sources (1:14)

·         Priorities (1:47)