About

This website serves as the digital counterpart to a larger research project on Kircher’s magnetism across his scientific works and serves as the digital object piece of the project for the Rare Books and Digital Humanities masters program at Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté. With this site, we strive to showcase the results of our research on Kircher’s great compilation work on magnetism, Magnes, sive de Arte Magnetica in an engaging and informative way. Through this website, we try to increase availability and access to analysis on Magnes to a variety of diverse online users, including enthusiasts, amateurs, scholars, specialists and researchers. The viewer can explore how the themes and presentation style of Magnes supports Kircher’s particular and fascinating magnetic theories.

Historically, Kircher was a popular and famous writer but by the end of his career his works, theories and philosophies were placed under more scrutiny, and he fell out of favor. In the last forty or fifty years that his name reemerged in the academic consciousness. John Fletcher was one of the few scholars writing about Kircher during the mid-20^th century, ultimately publishing more than 20 articles on the Jesuit. More widespread attention occurred with Paula Findlen’s 2004 book Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, which compiled essays from various scholars from different institutions with an interest in Kircher. His expansive and varied body of work have been a source of inspiration and interest for scholars and modern audiences.

However, this interest tends to focus on his linguistic work, especially his attempts to translate hieroglyphic and Chinese and his work on cryptology. Even when studying his natural philosophies, scholars tend to focus on topics such as his theory of optics, geology, or music. Articles which focus on physics and hard sciences often speak about his work in geology or volcanology. While his magnetic theories pervade much of his natural science work, but only a few of these articles reference his particular theories of magnetism in anything more than passing. Few studies focus primarily on this topic, and even fewer specifically utilize Magnes, sive de Arte Magnetica.

The research project’s digital object counterpart thus attempts to present and showcase Kircher’s magnetic compendium on a global online platform accessible to a potential audience of scientific and humanist communities. One of our goals is to make our conclusions available to a more general public, not one only consisting of academics and scholars. The presentation of Kircher’s magnetic themes are supplemented by a selection from Magnes, in a dynamic and interactive environment meant to stimulate and engage lay and academic audiences alike.

Our website was inspired by the style of digital exhibits created by libraries like Bibliothèque Saint-Gèneviéve and the British Library. These exhibition websites rely heavily on the visualization of their source texts, accompanied by other multimedia elements, to present, and in fact demonstrate, their topic material in a dynamic and educational way. In these instances, the cultural institution presents a digital object, such as an online interactive digital exhibit, as a counterpart to a physical historical object held within the institution’s collections. In our case, the collection is made up of only one physical object – Magnes. The website is a dynamic and interactive portal of online exhibits with a high academic and educational value, titled Arte Magnetica. The tools and presentation style used by these websites, and ours, rely on digital tools which overlay functions, interactive annotations, to create the coherent presentation of interwoven storylines.

We wanted to capture the sense of wonder, discovery and exploration of deciphering the knowledge behind a text that forms a piece of the history of science in the visual design of the digital object. It is important that the viewer is able to read one of our findings, informed by a passage from the source text, and easily be able to refer to the page, the very sentence even, where it appears in the source text. The exhibits on each theme page represent samples of our research on Magnes, and serve to present our digital object as one coherent and immersive experience.

Ultimately, we approached the entire project from three distinct angles. The research paper relied on a historical analysis of our primary and secondary sources to explore the thesis statement while the content analysis and digital object involved more technological and interdisciplinary tools. We relied on secondary sources to supplement our understanding of the source text for the analysis of Magnes. The VoyantTools analysis provided the beginnings of a broader understanding of how Kircher utilized magnetic theories in his works. The third and final piece, this website, used visual presentation tools such as Exhibit.so and IIIF presentations to create an engaging exhibition of Magnes and clearly demonstrate the usage and connection of the broader areas of his magnetism to the book itself.