The academies of Renaissance Italy are being compared with internet social networks, such as Facebook. A major collaborative research project on The Italian Academies 1525-1700:The First Intellectual Networks of Early Modern Europe, is producing new findings on the complex world of academies in Renaissance Italy. The researchers have launched a website on Italian Academies to present their findings on social interactions among academy members during the Renaissance.
The team has also created an online Database of Italian Academies at the British Library with information on Renaissance academies and their members. The website for the database claims that: “The British Library holds some of the finest collections outside Italy of publications produced by Italian Academies and their members. Much of this material is catalogued in ways which have not permitted easy access by scholars working on a particular Academy or on Academies in general. The creation of a Themed Collection of…
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courtneyfinamore 
January 15th, 2013 at 10:40 AM
Courtney, re-blogging is fine, but tell us a little about why you think this is important.
January 16th, 2013 at 6:08 PM
I found this applicable to the course for our Week 2 discussions as it is a similar idea to ORLANDO and the Scottish Chapbooks project. They have taken material published by Italian Academies and their members and created a database, searchable by people, subjects, and images. They have done what the creators of ORLANDO and the Scottish Chapbook digitization project have done – taken a large body of relatively unsearchable data and made it far easier to access for research purposes. This process has resulted in their conclusion that the Italian Academies in the 1500’s through the 1700’s were the first form of social network, similar to the digitized versions we use today. They have also created a website presenting their research they’ve done on the idea using the publications they have included in their database.