The general aim is to understand how the development of alchemical metaphors in the 16th and 17th century contributed to the emergence of encyclopaedism. For this purpose, we assemble and (closely and distantly) analyse a digital corpus of Latin printed books from the fields of alchemy and Paracelsianism. Simultaneously, we analyse the existing NOSCEMUS digital corpus of Latin scientific prints (c. 1000 titles, 1450-1850) by cutting-edge computational methods. The aim is to create an AI-driven metaphor detector to explore the early modern evolution of cognitive metaphors and its role in the emergence of modern encyclopaedism.
Our team consists of three research groups
As an interdisciplinary project, TOME introduces various approaches, methods and expert skills. Therefore, the fifteen-member research team is divided into three relatively autonomous yet closely cooperating groups. Lucie Storchová leads the group of intellectual historians, each having its own semantic domain of metaphor (e.g. body, movement, architecture, agriculture, book, music).
The second group is pre-processing and assembling the alchemical digital corpus designed by the group leader Jo Hedesan. Vojtěch Kaše is in charge of the third group concentrating on developing computational tools to deliver the detector of metaphors. Principal investigator of TOME is Petr Pavlas, Comenius scholar and metaphorologist.
Research
Meet our team
Petr Pavlas
Principal Investigator
Vojtěch Kaše
Leader of the Computational Group
Georgiana (Jo) Hedesan
Leader of the Digital-Philological Group
Lucie Storchová
Leader of the Intellectual-Historical Group