This repository aims at conserving and describing the debates and discussions surrounding the epistemology of history between Raymond Aron, a french scholar and sociologist, and his colleagues and fellow board members at the History & Theory journal at Wesleyan University.
Those letters are conserved in la Bibliothèque Richelieu in the Département des Manuscrits under the reference NAF 28060, and are still undisclosed. They are written either in english or french. In the context of my past research on the epistemology of history I had access to those documents and I now want to encode them in order to map out the general network of scholars in the anglo-saxon academia who took part in the discussions pertaining to this subject matter during the 1950's, 1960's and the 1970's. This material also helps to draw a rare picture of the life of scientific research, highlighting the friendships, enmities and problems which drive the organisation of an institution such as a peer-reviewed journal.
Encoding those letters will help me to:
- Dress a list of participants in those debates and build a visualisation of this network.
- Map out the places and institutions most involved in this theoretical endeavour.
- Facilitate statistical analysis of the occurrences and co-occurrences of some keywords and schools of thoughts in those debates.
- Consign the bibliographical references used
- Describe the life and processes behind the exercice of science through an in-depth approach to the day to day life of an organisation dedicated to theoretical endeavours