Study and Research in the Age of the Digital Humanities: the Sphaera Project of the Max Planck Institute, Berlin

"The workshop is designed to provide doctoral students with insights into the use, potential and limitations of the new digital study and research tools available today. In particular, in the course of it we will deepen our knowledge of the 'data base' tool through the presentation and analysis of a very ambitious project underway at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. The Sphaera project https://sphaera.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de has made it possible to build and develop a very articulate and complex 'data base' essential for the study of the Sphere by John Sacrobosco. This text has served as an elementary manual of astronomy for about four centuries and has undergone countless commentaries and transformations in more than 350 printed editions. Studying and researching within such a large and diverse corpus necessitates the use of digital aids. This case study allows:
1) to define more precisely the potentialities and criticalities of the digital tools needed by the researcher today.
2) ) to explore the possibilities of analyzing a complex, multidimensional collection of historical data according to the precepts of network theory and the physics of complex systems"