The Digital Ark: From Taxonomy to Ontology in 17th-century Collections of Curiosities

When the famous seventeenth-century gardener John Tradescant named his home, with its collection of rarities and curiosities, “the Ark,” he was expressing his desire to compile a microcosm of a wide world of variety beyond common experience. Such collections represented the sum of early modern European experience of the world at a time of rapid scientific and geographical expansion and reflected fundamental epistemological shifts in attitudes toward curiosity, wonder, and credulity on the cusp of the modern age. The rapidly expanding world of exploration, colonization, and commerce in the seventeenth century proliferated with strange and bizarre creatures and artifacts that challenged the traditional limits of knowledge. To meet the need for a complete and accessible record of early modern collections, 'The Digital "Ark"' will accumulate a database of artifacts and natural specimens as represented by documentary records of early modern collections (inventories, diaries, correspondence, etc.), contemporary drawings and engravings, as well as digital images and curatorial records of extant remnants of these collections. It will be an extensive record of all known collections of rarities and curiosities in England and Scotland from 1580-1700 for which documentary evidence survives, comprising up to 10,000 specimens and artifacts. This information, both textual and visual, will be delivered in an open-access Web-based virtual museum that will collect and display artifacts and natural specimens drawing from a fully searchable database that will record and classify these items and their descriptions in some two dozen fields of information.