Projects

The formation of a scholar? Joachim Lelewel’s juvenile letters

The aim of the project is to create a digital edition of Joachim Lelewel’s correspondence exchanged with his closest family, i.e. his siblings and parents, in the years 1799–1811. The main part of the collection thus defined consists of his letters to his brother Prot, which show – first – a not always polite secondary school pupil, then – a perverse student, and finally – a beginning scholar ready to conquer the world of the scientific humanities. Letters to parents are different in character. Above all, they are more careful and show how Joachim sought approval for his ideas and support, including financial support, of his father and mother. The final caesura of the project is the moment when Lelewel, after leaving Vilnius, takes his first steps as a professional historian.

Team: Aleksandra Kuligowska, PhD; Iga Bąska, MA; Marta Kuźma, EngD; Hanna Rajfura, PhD

Collaborators: Magdalena Dorosz, MA; Agnieszka Pawłowska-Kubik, PhD

Objectives

Joachim Lelewel’s juvenile letters are a fundamental source for the study of the process of the formation of his conception of doing historical science. This is important because it was Lelewel who was the founder of Polish scientific historiography (in the sense appropriate to his times). First edition of some of these letters, published by J.K. Żupański’s bookshop in 1878, although eagerly quoted in the literature, has many deficiencies. This is because it is not a critical edition and it contains numerous errors. These include misread words, omitted passages that might have been difficult to read, notes by other hands removed from the text of the edition, as well as extended farewell formulas or postscripts modified from the original.

The new edition is intended to fill a gap in historiography and offer the first critical (by today’s standards) edition of Lelewel’s letters to his family from his youth. It will provide sources for research into how the young scholar’s mind was formed. Moreover, it will certainly enable textual research into the epistolography of the 1810s for representatives of various disciplines. Historians and cultural studies scholars will find sources for the history of Vilnius University, family history, social history, history of scientific thought and much more. To no lesser extent, the edition will be able to serve philologists and linguists, as it provides the text in the form of transliteration and transcription, as well as scans of letters.

Methodologies

The correspondence will be prepared using the publishing instructions edited by Kazimierz Lepszy (1953). However, those instructions will only serve to support the solution of general editing problems, such as the modernisation of graphics or elements of the scientific apparatus. Digital edition will provide the user with a text tagged according to the TEI XML standard. Therefore, an important problem facing the editing team is the shape of the critical and scientific apparatus. Its content reflects a discussion of what subjects could potentially interest the user. The team chose maximalist solutions. Not only will places, persons, works, events, and interjections in languages other than Polish be explained, but also those parts of the text that may already be difficult to understand today due to the different language of intellectual discussions of the 19th century.

The main source used in the project are the manuscripts of Joachim Lelewel’s correspondence held at the National Library in Warsaw. It is possible, however, that further queries, carried out at the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków and the Library of the Ossoliński National Institute in Wrocław, as well as the Library of Vilnius University, will bring further results.

Outcomes

The project will result in the first critical digital edition of Joachim Lelewel’s juvenile letters to his family, providing text files of the edition encoded in the TEI XML standard and their visualisations offering both transcription and transliteration of the text, as well as scans of the sources. As part of the project, databases of people and places appearing in the letters will be prepared to provide a spatial representation of Lelewel’s letter communication during the period under study.

The project carried out from 2023 to 2024 as part of the activities of the Digital History Laboratory of the Faculty of History, University of Warsaw, thanks to funding from the Excellence Initiative – Research University programme (action I.3.6. ‘Digital Humanities’) and with the support of the Digital Competence Centre, University of Warsaw.

“Catalogue of the Archbishops of Gniezno” by Jan Długosz. Digital edition of selected fragments of the source

Principal Investigator: Hanna Rajfura, PhD

The aim of the project is to prepare a digital edition of selected fragments of Jan Długosz’s “Catalogue of Archbishops of Gniezno”, written around 1476. It is one of six dignitary catalogues written by Jan Długosz (d. 1480), canon of the Kraków cathedral chapter and historian, considered one of the most eminent historians of medieval Poland. The catalogue presents lives and achievements of archbishops of Gniezno, starting with the fictional hierarchs of the 10th century and ending with the primates contemporary to Długosz. It is an important and frequently used source of knowledge about the Polish medieval Church, Długosz’s writing technique, his worldview, and the development of Polish historiography in the 15th century. However, this work has been almost completely unexplored until now. An attempt to fill this gap was made by the analyses carried out by Hanna Rajfura, PhD as part of the ‘Diamond Grant’ project (funding: Ministry of Science and Higher Education/Ministry of Education and Science) carried out from 2016 to 2022 at the Historical Institute/Faculty of History of the University of Warsaw, which were reflected in her doctoral dissertation entitled “‘The Catalogue of the Archbishops of Gniezno’ by Jan Długosz: A Study in Source Criticism and Historical Memory of the Late Middle Ages”, defended in 2022. This digital edition uses the results of this sources study.

At present we only have the 1887 edition of the Catalogue prepared by I. Polkowski and Ż. Pauli, which, however, does not take into account all of the surviving manuscripts of the source and does not provide full information on the variants occurring in the manuscripts of the “Catalogue”. Moreover, this edition contains errors. This makes the preparation of a new – de facto first critical – edition of the “Catalogue” an important research task.

This digital edition will contain selected but representative extracts from the text of the Catalogue. It will show what a digital edition of a medieval narrative-historiographical source might look like and what functionalities such an edition could contain. This edition can serve as one of the voices in the discussion about the practices of digital editing and how the solutions of traditional editing developed so far can be combined with the new possibilities offered by digital technology. The source text will be edited using the XML markup language, the TEI electronic text representation standard, and presented using the TEI Publisher visualisation tool. The text of the edition will be hosted on the TEI Publisher website, and this page will contain an introduction to the edition with a description of the editing principles, a link to the source text hosted on the TEI Publisher website, as well as a personal and local index and a bibliography.

Economic changes in the Roman empire between the Principate period and Late Antiquity

Principal Investigator: Paulina Komar, PhD

The main purpose of the project is to investigate economic changes in the Roman Empire between the Principate and Late Antiquity by means of ceramic analyses using digital humanities methods (visualisations, probabilistic aorist methods, regression analyses, gravity models). This objective will be achieved by:
1. Determining the share of the free market in the Roman economy of the Principate and Late Antiquity periods and identifying the factors controlling the different sectors of trade through the use of regression analyses.
2. creation of models of consumption in Italy, and analysis of the supply network of the centre of the Roman Empire for basic foodstuffs in different historical periods (visualisations using probabilistic aorist methods).
3. Creation and comparison of gravity models of trade in the Mediterranean Sea basin for the period of Principate and Late Antiquity.

The primary source is a database including information on amphoras from Italy created for the project ‘Market economy or oriental bazaar? The nature of the Roman economy based on the distribution of amphorae in Italy’ (NCN Sonata No. 2019/35/D/HS3/02142), enriched with data for Ephesus, Cyprus, Spain and Gaul. The numbers of amphoras will be quantified and visualised using the following computational and computer methods:
1. regression analysis – in this project, regression is used to investigate the relationship between the proportion of amphorae in different parts of the Mediterranean Sea basin and their transport costs.
2. visualisation using probabilistic aorist methods will identify long-term changes in the number of amphorae, the number of sites where they were found, and the number of different types of amphorae.
3. gravity model – this is a gravity model based on Newton’s law assuming the interaction of mass and distance. In the project, this model will be used to analyse the relationship between mass (the amount of imports) and distance (travel time between production and consumption sites) in six relevant regions in the Mediterranean Sea basin.

In this way, the project will provide a novel and interdisciplinary approach to trade and consumption in ancient Rome, and the results will enable a better understanding of the nature of economic change in Antiquity. The project is carried out in collaboration with Tom Brughmans, PhD, of Aarhus University, and Prof. Justin Leidwanger of Stanford University.

The project carried out in 2024 as part of the activities of the Digital History Laboratory of the Faculty of History, University of Warsaw, thanks to funding from the Excellence Initiative – Research University programme (action I.3.6. ‘Digital Humanities’) and with the support of the Digital Competence Centre, University of Warsaw.

To improve living conditions and health. Border traffic from Piotrków County in the years 1919–1939

Principal Investigator: Maciej Wzorek, MA

A collection of passport applications and lists of issued passports from the years 1919–1939 has been preserved in archival group Starostwo Powiatowe Piotrkowskie from the resources of the State Archive in Piotrków Trybunalski. The high degree of completeness of the documentation is exceptional in comparison with other resources of this kind preserved in Polish state archives (among the few preserved collections of passport applications, in a similar state of preservation are passport cases from the group of the Starostwo Grodzkie Krakowskie stored in the National Archive in Kraków and from the group of the Starostwo Powiatowe Sanockie stored in the State Archive in Przemyśl).

The aim of the project is to investigate, with the help of digital tools, what relations existed between the motivations for travelling abroad formulated in the applications (the research covers both emigration and tourism trips) and other factors appearing in the documentation, such as destination, religion, age, profession, gender or marital status. The publications of the Central Statistical Office used so far in studies on migration movement, depending on the year of issue, provide different types of data with varying degrees of detail. For example, information on the number of emigrants from individual voivodeships was provided only for the years 1925–1929. In other yearbooks, the number of emigrants is given for the whole country or for groups of voivodeships (central, western, eastern, southern, the capital city of Warsaw). Publications of the Statistics Poland take little account of the relationships between different categories of data. Usually the relationships given are: place of emigration – religion – gender, and for some yearbooks: voivodeship – religion or: occupational group – place of emigration.

The large number of details included in passport applications makes it possible to examine a larger number of relationships, e.g. place of departure – reason for departure, religion – occupation – reason for departure, etc. The reasons for departure declared by applicants make it possible to determine whether the departure was an emigration (one left “to improve one’s living conditions”, “to work”, “for permanent residence”, etc.) or a tourist trip. In the latter case, specific categories can be distinguished, e.g. medical tourism (“to improve health”, “for treatment”), business tourism (“to hire professional staff”), religious tourism (“to visit holy places”) or personal tourism (“to bring back a son’s remains”, “to get married”).

An important aspect of the study in the context of emigration is to determine whether migrants go to a family already settled abroad. This can contribute to further research on the influence of family ties on the formation of the emigration movement and the formation of emigrant communities abroad.

Based on the project, which was carried out in 2024, a scientific article is being prepared.

The dispute over method. Joachim Lelewel’s polemic with Nikolai Karamzin

Team: Aleksandra Kuligowska, PhD (Principal Investigator); Iga Bąska, MA; Elżbieta Kwiecińska, PhD

The subject of the research is the text of Joachim Lelewel’s polemic against the work of Nikolai Karamzin, which is part of the fundamental dispute over method which arose between Vilnius and St Petersburg in the 1820s. It is not without reason that Lelewel’s polemical speech was compared in the project’s title to the Methodenstreit at the turn of the 20th century, which took place among prominent German historians. The Vilnius professor had, almost a century earlier, consciously called for a clear definition of what scientific historiography was.

The aim of the edition, besides preparing the first comprehensive edition of Lelewel’s polemic available to researchers of historical methods, is to show how – also in Polish historiography – a fundamental reflection on the workshop of scientific history was born in the early nineteenth century. The methodological value of this text has already been pointed out by Nina Assorodobraj, who published a fragment of it in Lelewel’s “Methodological Writings”. The editor indicated that the entire polemic would be published in a section edited by Jerzy Ochmański with an introduction by Henryk Łowmiański. However, this did not happen – the review of Karamzin’s work was omitted. For the sake of Polish cultural heritage, therefore, filling this gap is necessary.

A peculiarity of the edition will be that it will include not only the Polish version of the great Polish scholar’s review. The edition will also include Tadeusz Bułharyn’s translation into Russian, together with its translation into contemporary Polish, necessary to show the manipulations on the text carried out by the editor of “Severnyy Arkhiv”. The edition will also include other fragments of Lelewel’s reviews scattered in Polish scientific periodicals of the 19th century. The traditional edition, prepared in accordance with the scientific principles of the editorial art, will be reflected in a digital version, made available on a website, showing the possibilities offered by digital humanities in the processing of source texts important to Polish national heritage.

Project carried out between 2024 and 2027 as part of the National Programme for the Development of the Humanities, National Heritage module (competition 12).