ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Natural Sciences and Electronic Enlightenment: Addressing the Digital Divide in Archives

• In Event: The Impact of the Digital Revolution on the History of Science and its Social Implications-2

English Abstract

This presentation will firstly, introduce the recently redesigned Electronic Enlightenment: Lives and Letters to the audience. With 80,177 letters and documents and 10,357 correspondents as of Spring 2025, Electronic Enlightenment is the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century. These include correspondences by canonical natural scientists and philosophers such as Boyle, Descartes, Franklin, Herschel, Holbach, Lavoisier, Linnaeus and a multitude of others. The web of correspondences allows the users to research conversational topics and interests across the centuries.
Secondly, given the recent scholarship in postcolonial and gender studies, this paper will highlight the digital divide, the data bias in a project such as Electronic Enlightenment. Women scientists and philosophers are in the minority. This is not only due to the lack of historical documents or correspondences but also due to the inherent bias of what is digitized and what is left out. We will close with some reflections on how to address the digital divide in archives.

Author

• Nicole Barbara Pohl, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford