Jonas Fischer

I am a Doctoral Researcher in Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki. I have a background in Ancient History and I’m currently a member of the MSCA doctoral network MECANO and the Helsinki Computational History Group. My research focus is on the presence of the classics in early modern British book history, especially regarding the reception and reuse of ancient texts and their publication patterns in the printing industry.


The Presence of Classics in Early Modern Book History

The aim of this PhD project is to study the reuse of Latin scientific and technical texts in (Early) Modern England. The Helsinki Computational History Group has used automated methods to detect all the instances of text reuse in the largest collections of printed data for British books (1470–1800, > 250.000 works) available in machine-readable form: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and Early English Books Online (EEBO-tcp phase II). The result is a massive dataset of linked text-reuse fragments, which are qualified, clustered and compared. Based on this dataset, the project will focus on the text reuse of a selected group of Latin scientific authors such as Lucretius, Pliny the Elder, and Vitruvius, and their reception and reuse in Early Modern works.