The Digital Ark is a database of artifacts and natural specimens as represented in surviving records of early modern collections, museum databases, contemporary drawings and engravings, as well as images of extant remnants of these collections. It is an outcome of the “Culture of Curiosity in England and Scotland, 1580-1700” and the current phase of this project, “The Social Network of Collections of Curiosities.” Both phases have been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC-CRSH).

At its core, this dataset consists of historical documents related to early modern collections of curiosities in England and Scotland, chiefly catalogues, inventories, diary entries, and letters, and other communications. These documents are marked-up in XML following the TEI 5 standard to mark and identify people, places, objects, dates, and bibliographic references. These are keyed to a project database containing entries for each of these referenced entities: some 5,000 people, 4,000 places, and 24,000 objects.

Who we are:
The project lead is Brent Nelson, Professor of English, at the University of Saskatchewan.
Other major participants in the current phase of the project include:
Craig Harkema, Digital Initiatives Librarian, University of Saskatchewan
Kyle Dase, SSHRC post-doctoral fellow in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at University of Victory (PhD University of Saskatchewan)
Darryl Friesen, Developer, Information Technology Department, Unviersity of Saskatchewan.

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