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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.