Notes on Machine-readable Sources for the History of Philosophy

Abstract

In the last decades, a variety of digital resources has become available to historians of thought, enabling them to increasingly rely on digitised sources for their researches. Numerous projects developed infrastructures designed for the retrieval, collection and analysis of historical and critical sources. It is difficult to map the landscape of such resources due to the diversity of their aims, scopes and treated subjects, and the lack of shared standards in their contents and designs makes them difficult to compare. Yet, this variety of architectures seems to mirror the plurality of research approaches that characterises historiography of thought. This contribution discusses four types of resources: author-centred collections, thematic collections, generalist infrastructures and repositories of bibliographic and archival records. By relying on the notion of machine-readability as developed within the FAIR guidelines, these types of infrastructures are presented as resources available, to different degrees of accessibility, to historians of thought to answer diverse research needs.