Editor’s Note: Over the past two years we have been fortunate to have had the assistance of twelve students working on various aspects of the project. They have come not only from the UK but also from Switzerland, America, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Korea and China. They have all made invaluable contributions and enabled us to do far more than we originally thought we could … Continue reading Work Placement Experience on the ‘Enlightenment Architectures’ Project: Using Digital Humanities to help understand how Sloane organized his collection  

The article “Digital Humanities in the Memory Institution: The Challenges of Encoding Sir Hans Sloane’s Early Modern Catalogues of His Collections” arising from the Enlightenment Architectures Project has been published in the open access journal Open Library of Humanities. Click here to access it. Abstract Catalogues are the core documents of museum structure and meaning. Yet no significant computational analysis has been made of how catalogues from the early … Continue reading New article published on the Enlightenment Architectures Project

The Enlightenment gallery at the British Museum is unlike any other gallery in the museum. The objects are not limited to one time period, culture or theme, but instead range from the prehistoric era up until the beginning of the nineteenth century. They give us an insight into a variety of locations and cultures, from Japan to Jamaica, from Chile to China, as well as … Continue reading The Enlightenment Gallery: A Brief Introduction

Sir Hans Sloane’s collection, then and now, brings together a vast array of objects from across a diverse range of themes that came from across the globe. Through analysing the 44 remaining catalogues of his collection, we can begin to get a sense of the range of topics that Sloane was interested in and collecting; these include antiquities, botany, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology, zoology, manuscripts, printed … Continue reading Stepping into Sir Hans Sloane’s Shoe Collection