The EHRC committee is pleased to announce the first recipients of the new Visibility Award Scheme for staff and students in Modern Languages. Number 1 up is the project to map the correspondence of Catherine the Great. Andrew Kahn writes:
CatCor: The Digital Correspondence of Catherine the Great is delighted to be a recipient of £1000 from the EHRC Visibility Challenge scheme. Led by Professor Andrew Kahn and Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, the project aims to unite the known letters of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (reigned 1762-1796) in a single database, making them fully searchable, creating extensive cross-references between letters using TEI XML text mark-up, and thus offering scholars and the general public ready access to this rich corpus of thousands of letters. The EHRC grant will fund the mapping of Catherine’s correspondence: for the first time we will be able to visualise the imperial scale of Catherine’s geographically diverse correspondences and to compare her epistolary network to those of other key figures of the European Enlightenment. By necessity and by design a multidisciplinary project, CatCor adds to Oxford’s extensive digital resources, especially projects focused on eighteenth-century correspondences like Electronic Enlightenment and Cultures of Knowledge; with its new map, it will make more visible the ways in which Catherine crossed borders culturally and politically. The map will also help make the project itself more visible, generating images with which the advantages of the single database can readily be seen. Thank you to EHRC Visibility Challenge!
Further information on the EHRC Visibility Challenge is available here.