BorGal results from a collaboration between La Sapienza the University of Rome and Stanford University, with the research support of CESTA, the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. BorGal succeeded in drawing a complete digital catalogue of the scattered correspondence of the Italian physiologist, physicist, and mathematician Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608-1679) and in reconstructing his overlapping social, intellectual, and political networks. A total amount of 668 letters, 641 persons, 229 books have been catalogued and coded. This data will be open accessible and reusable on the project website (www.borgal.eu) where scholars will be able to visualize the correspondence’s flows on Borelli’s network of networks, as well as to address specific topics applying digital humanities and historical network research tools.
Borelli was a leading figure among the natural philosophers belonging to the 'Galileo's school' and the preeminent figure of the Accademia del Cimento in Florence. He was the only one of his generation to adapt Galileo’s methodology – that is experimental practice along with a mechanistic and geometrical epistemic model – to the different branches of scientific research; like Galileo’s, his experimentalism was based on a strong theoretical and even ‘ideological’ approach. His life and work show that Galileo’s (disputed) legacy was not only a Tuscan heritage and that the 17th century Italian scientific ‘Republic of Letters’ was a whole, complex and intertwined community, that included also the alleged ’peripheral’ Spanish Sicily. Moreover, Borelli’s freedom of thought about Nature coupled with his standing for political dissent (he was among the ideologues of the Messina Revolt of 1674-78). This coincidence makes him a unique case to investigate the relation between science, religion, and politics in the Catholic South of Early Modern Europe. Assuming a relational perspective and taking advantage of digital tools, we provided scholars and the public with the data and the digital tools to map, chart, 'heuristically' visualize the multi-layered and spatial dimensions of 'Borelli's galaxy' (places, people, works, letters, instruments, objects, information…), as well as to experience the way 'Galileo's heritage' took shape while circulating across the ‘Republic of Letters’.
