Virtual Archive of Logical Empiricism (VALEP)

This is the electronic hanbook of VALEP. The page was created on Dec 1, 2020 and will be continusly developed in the following weeks.

• On the history, hosts, and cooperation partners of VALEP see About VALEP
• See how VALEP is processing knowledge into metadata
• Or jump directly to VALEP

The scope and mission of VALEP

VALEP is an archive management tool that is intended as a platform for the history of Logical Empiricism and related currents.

VALEP processes

• (left/red part of the window) the hierarchical structures of archives that include archives, collections, digitizations, shelfs, boxes, folders, files

• (middle/green part of the window) documents that process files of an archive into objects that belong to a certain document category, document type and become specified by means of metadata that include title, description, author, date

• (upper right/yellow part of the window) All archive nodes and documents are characterized by metadata that can be viewed in the upper right part of the window

• (lower right/blue part of the window) Files and documents can be watched in an integrated document viewer (already available) and they can be downloaded and printed (to be implemented in 2021)

VALEP stores titles, descriptions and the like as Unicode. But some metadata categories that include date, location, language, persons, and institutions are stored here via references in a relational database and/or using special formats and parsing tools, e.g., EDTF for data, and an internal tool for the mereological grasp of locations. See the metadata page for the details.

Is it digital humanities?

If one expects from a digital humanities project the adoption of sophisticated statistical methods of experimental research, then the answer is clearly no. Though the data pool being built by VALEP might in the future be used for the adoption of such methods, VALEP neither now nor in the near future is planning to integrate any tools for complex statistical evaluation.

On the other hand, VALEP is certainly aiming to collect large amounts of data. The history of Logical Empiricism, together with related currents such as Neokantianism, French Positivism, British Empiricism, and American Pragmatism, comprises of dozens of main figures and probably thousands of minor figures that include university and private scholars. The estates of many of these relevant figures are to be found in public institutions and private collections. Further material was collected by relevant universitarian and private institutions. There are thousands of manuscripts, publications, and probably millions of letters between representatives of the relevant currents that might be taken into account in one or another way, in our studies of Logical Empiricism. VALEP allows us to story any of these sources, as soon as we get them available in electronic form. Then, we can search them and filter them, in order to select the material that is relevant for us. This is, of course, also a variety of digital humanities.

Existing tools are document oriented and typically cover only rudimentary metadata

Existing tools for the management of archival sources include (1) those tools that university archives such as the Archives of Scientific Philosophy use; (2) open tools such as PhilArchive where everybody might upload electronic documents; (3) tools being tailored for the presentation of the material of a specific origin such as the papers of Ludwig Wittgenstein. All these tools have in common that they are more or less strictly document oriented. They do not mirror the physical structure of an archive but rather store documents that form a particular unit of metadata. This approach could be fruitful, if the processing of the documents might be rather well developed and the metadata might be clear and transparent and sufficiently complex.

However, the problem is that most of the existing tools cover only rather rudimentary metadata, and, in the case of the tools being used by public archives, the problem is often that they hardly process single documents as forming a logical unit of some kind (e.g. letter from Otto Neurath to Rudolf Carnap from December 26, 1934) but rather focus on those units being naturally provided by the archive, viz., folders that contain, e.g., several letters from Carnap to Neurath from the years 1923 to 1929 and sometimes might also include further material that does not directly relate to the main theme. In cases like that, complex metadata may not be possible at all, simply because the document units are too vague.

In cases like that, an archive oriented presentation might be helpful

In cases where a digital archive only covers rudimentary metadata and rather ambiguous documents, it might be most helpful to