About the project

My plan for the Vossius Fellowship is to prepare a larger project about data collection in the 18^th/19^th-century humanities. Building upon my PhD thesis, The Transformation of the Humanities (2018), and on my FWO postdoctoral project, Gathering Language (2018-2022), this project studies the conceptualization of language, history, religion, art, and antiquity as objects of study through the lens of data collection: how source publications, collections of language material, antiquarian compendia, and musealization have exemplified and even defined what these notions stand for. The word ‘data’ was used in the 18^th century already; the question is how something (a language, a historical record, an inscription, a collection of artworks or curiosities or antique remains or ethnographic objects) becomes ‘data’ in the sense of standardized bits of information, and how that data is used to build something more than that: a narrative of historical development, a linguistic classification, a reconstruction of the past, a theory of culture. In short, it aims to analyze the ongoing dialectics between data gathering and theory formation.

A recurrent theme is how these data collections both defined disciplines and crossed disciplinary boundaries. Early modern antiquarianism, for instance, was a diffuse phenomenon that covered all kinds of ancient documents and monuments, art objects and inscriptions – and yet it laid the foundation for modern art history and archaeology. The mapping of the languages of the world, from the late 18^th century onward, was also an ethnographic, geographic, historical and even naturalistic process, as language material was used in the classification of languages, peoples, and cultures and to underpin theories of race and historical migrations. Religion was studied in the form of sacred texts, cultic objects, and ethnographic reports – and comparative religion emerged out of comparative philology. Historical source collections – particularly of medieval charters, acts, and scriptores and of ancient inscriptions – were also philological exercises.

The main question to explore is: how to study this mer à boire? Especially for 19^th-century historical source publications, the corpus is too large to muster humanly. With collections of language material, as I know from experience, this is more doable; these are planned to be the basis of my second monograph, Language and the Mapping of the World. Each of the project’s strands will have to find the right balance between large-corpus analysis of the organization of knowledge and thick description of scholarly practice.

About the researcher

Floris Solleveld is a historian with a background in philosophy (UvA, 2007), specialized in the cultural history of knowledge. His PhD thesis (Nijmegen, 2018) was a study of the transformation of Enlightenment-era scholarship into the 19^th-century humanities. As a postdoc at KU Leuven (2018-2022) he studied the mapping of the world’s languages and peoples in the colonial era; before returning to Vossius he was a research associate at University of Bristol as part of a larger AHRC/DFG project on global missionary translation networks. He is review editor of History of Humanities. His first book, under the working title After Erudition, is under contract with Brill.