The CKCC project aims to equip the researchers with the instruments they need to answer three comprehensive research questions.

• How did knowledge circulate in the 17th-century Republic of Letters? How were elements of knowledge picked up by the learned community? How was this new knowledge processed, disseminated, theorized and ultimately accepted, or rejected?
• How can we combine and structure various sets of letters of 17th-century scholars in such a way that we can analyze the circulation of knowledge in an international context and follow the development of themes of interest in space and time?
• How can we make this information on knowledge production accessible to interdisciplinary research in the Humanities?

Additional research questions we hope to answer during the development of analysis and visusalization tools:

• To what extent can keyword and concept extraction techniques be applied to the task of analyzing knowledge circulation? Along which dimensions and how do we need to make extensions to existing approaches for full applicability to our data?
• What are best practices to locate, and/or to develop lexical resources that enable adaptation of tools currently existing for processing English to processing other languages featured in 17th century scholarly letters.

The consortium is in the process of building the web-based tools to analyze and visualize the 17th-century epistolary networks and their themes of interest, collecting the correspondences in machine readable formal and to enrich this corpus with annotations. The collaboratory will not only contribute to our understanding of the circulation of knowledge in the 17th century, but also generate useful technologies for cross-disciplinary collaborations involving data-sharing and data enrichment in the Humanities. As such, this web-based Humanities collaboratory on correspondences is a valuable prototype for possible future research collaborations focusing on large, heterogeneous datasets.