Sarah Lang
banner
sarahalang.bsky.social
Sarah Lang
@sarahalang.bsky.social
Head of Digital Humanities at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin). Previously DH Graz. Alchemy and early modern history of science.
Reposted by Sarah Lang
During Q&A, Piorko alludes to a previous collaboration w/Lang that culminated in the decryption of a polyalphabetic substitution cipher in Arthur Dee's alchemical notebook (Sloane MS 1902).

Here's the full story courtesy of @atlasobscura.com: www.atlasobscura.com/articles/med... #HSS2025 #alchemy
How Scholars Cracked a Medieval Alchemist’s Secret Code
Written in a puzzling Latin cipher, it contains his formula for eternal life.
www.atlasobscura.com
November 16, 2025 at 4:25 PM
Reposted by Sarah Lang
Lang has also created a YouTube class for curators, instructors & collectors who are interested in digitizing the materiality of pre-modern books.

You can watch the full playlist here: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

#HSS2025 #RareBooks #SpecColls
Digitizing the Materiality of the Premodern Book - YouTube
This playlist is part of the project "Digitizing the Materiality of the Premodern Book" ( https://dha.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/de/digitizing-materiality-premodern-boo...
www.youtube.com
November 16, 2025 at 4:12 PM
Reposted by Sarah Lang
Piorko now shifts to an analysis of a 3rd text: Botanologia, an English herbal by physician William Salmon published in 1710.

Villanova's copy of the book is filled w/a wide variety of specimens corresponding to its entries, including plants from the New World (e.g. South Carolina) #HSS2025 #botany
November 16, 2025 at 4:03 PM
Reposted by Sarah Lang
Some of you may be wondering whether AI/LLMs could facilitate the analysis of alchemical texts.

Lang notes one potential use: analyzing early modern recipe books & extracting lists of ingredients--but emphasizes the need for human proofreading. (It can save some labor but often adds more!) #HSS2025
November 16, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Reposted by Sarah Lang
Lang has colleagues who attempted to reproduce the recipes in Processus Universalis. The chemists then grouped similar recipe variants based on their experiments.

Interestingly, their findings aligned w/stylometric analysis (see below), a quantitative technique to analyze literary style #HSS2025
November 16, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Reposted by Sarah Lang
Lang now shifts the discussion to another project, looking @ the Processus Universalis, a cluster of alchemical texts that exists in 100+ versions.

Since 2018, the Gotha Alchemy Network has transcribed 17 versions of those texts & the dataset is online: github.com/sarahalang/p... #HSS2025 #DigHum
GitHub - sarahalang/processus-universalis: This contains XML documents from the 2018-2019 "Processus Universalis" project by Netzwerk Alchemie (Gotha) and serves as a testbed to explore future applica...
This contains XML documents from the 2018-2019 "Processus Universalis" project by Netzwerk Alchemie (Gotha) and serves as a testbed to explore future applications building on this chemica...
github.com
November 16, 2025 at 3:39 PM
Reposted by Sarah Lang
Lang: Some of the changes in the AA are merely literary flourishes, but there are more substantive additions, including citations to specific (e.g., Basil Valentine) & anonymous alchemical authorities. Such inclusions helped reaffirm Dee's intellectual pedigree & experimental authority. #HSS2025
November 16, 2025 at 3:29 PM
Reposted by Sarah Lang
Sarah Lang describes how she & Piorko compared the text in Dee's 2 texts using MS Word's track changes functions. They then converted the data into XML & wrote code to create these visualizations.

(The gray lines in the image on the right show where corollaries start.)

#HSS2025 #DigitalHumanities
November 16, 2025 at 3:26 PM
Reposted by Sarah Lang
Piorko: Arthur Dee went out of his way to praise specific experimental practitioners, but some of the most curious sections in AA revolve around anonymity.

Here we see one example of a quote previously attributed to Ripley but later rewritten & described in the margins as "anonymous" #HSS2025
November 16, 2025 at 3:19 PM
Reposted by Sarah Lang
Piorko compares an earlier text (Fasciculus Chemicum) & Arca Arcanorum to shed light on Dee's alchemical journey.

For example, he added relevant passages/citations/images in AA (e.g. Tractatus Maximi Domini Dunstani (Sloane MS 1876) & the Ripley Scroll) to emphasize his new achievements #HSS2025
November 16, 2025 at 3:14 PM
Reposted by Sarah Lang
Last up is Torsten Roeder with a talk on "Greening DH" elaborating on DH and its struggle of depending on computers, computing, and infrastructures which, however, is one of the big drivers of climate change. Is DH actually sustainable in itself? #efficiency #sufficiency #consistency #solarcomputing
June 13, 2025 at 8:24 AM
Reposted by Sarah Lang
Followed by @sarahalang.bsky.social's talk on "Empowerment:" DH does not have a gender problem, but an underrepresentation of feminized topics. Feminized labor remains undervalued (in academia). Let's focus more on making labor visible by e.g. recognizing datasheets as valuable research outcomes.
June 13, 2025 at 8:24 AM