Project round up. Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogues of his Collections (2016-19).
The project entitled Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogues of his Collections was a Leverhulme funded research project (2016-19, RPG 2016-239) based at the British Museum and carried out in close collaboration with UCL. Our project resulted in quite a few outputs, published in various places, so I’m going to use this post to bring together a sub-set of project publications with a significant digital humanities aspect. The project was led by Dr Kim Sloan, Curator, Dept. of Prints and Drawings and Enlightenment Gallery, British Museum with me as the project’s co-Investigator. Project researchers included Dr Martha Fleming; Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird, Dr Victoria Pickering and Deborah Leem. After setting out the aims of the project, below you will find an overview of our peer reviewed articles, datasets and digital editions with a significant digital humanities element.
Aims of the project
Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) was a physician, naturalist, Secretary and later President of the Royal Society as well as of the Royal College of Physicians. He amassed a vast and varied collection during his long life. Assembled from c.1680s on, in part financed by profits from the transatlantic slave trade, the collection was made as Britain became a global trading and imperial power. By the time of his death in 1753, his collection comprised over 50,000 books and manuscripts, thousands of natural history objects such as fossils and botanical specimens, ethnographic materials, coins, antiquities, hundreds of albums of prints and drawings and many other objects. As he collected these objects, Sloane (and his amanuenses) labelled and described them in catalogues. Sloane created more than 40 volumes of manuscript catalogues relating to the different parts of his wider collection. Sloane’s collection and the catalogues that describe them are now separated across three UK national institutions that grew out of his collection: the British Museum (BM), the Natural History Museum (NHM) and the British Library (BL).
The project Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogues of his Collections aimed to combine the research approaches and techniques of the disciplines of museum studies, history, and digital humanities to explore Sloane’s catalogues as ‘meta-data of the Enlightenment’. Sloane’s manuscript catalogues contain an array of descriptions and include information about from where and from whom objects came and their potential uses. These catalogues not only list what was once in Sloane’s collection, but crucially also reveal the way Sloane and his contemporaries organized and classified the world — through their descriptions, cross-references, numerical and symbolic codes, page layouts and more. Our project wanted to understand more about the intellectual structures of Sloane’s 300-year-old manuscript catalogues, and with them, the origins of the Enlightenment disciplines they helped to shape. We sought to understand how practices in the organization of information about encyclopedic collections influenced and produced knowledge and ways of knowing, and vice versa. The project likewise sought to provide new data about historical names and places, along with epistemological reflections on the computational encounter with collections such as Sloane’s, which were brought together during a time of imperial expansion, colonialism, and the human exploitation and coercion of the transatlantic Slave trade. Project outputs included:
Ortolja-Baird A. & Pickering V. & Nyhan J. & Sloan K. & Fleming M., ‘Digital Humanities in the Memory Institution: The Challenges of Encoding Sir Hans Sloane’s Early Modern Catalogues of His Collections’, Open Library of Humanities 5(1) (2019). OPEN ACCESS https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.409
“In this article we explore some of the challenges of seeking to integrate the methods of digital humanities with those of cataloguing, inventory, curatorial and historical studies and of bringing such interdisciplinary approaches to bear on early modern documentary sources. We do this through two case studies that highlight the approaches to encoding Sloane’s catalogues in TEI that Enlightenment Architectures has employed and the major challenges that these have brought to the fore” (Abstract).
Sloan, K. and Nyhan, J., ‘Enlightenment architectures: The reconstruction of Sir Hans Sloane’s cabinets of ‘Miscellanies’, Journal of the History of Collections: 33. 2 (July 2021): 199–218. OPEN ACCESS https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhaa034
“this paper asks firstly how Sloane described objects and secondly whether the original contents of the cabinets can be reconstructed from his catalogue. Drawing on a sustained, digitally augmented analysis – the first of its kind – of Sloane’s catalogues, we respond to these questions and offer an initial analysis of the contents of the cabinets that held the miscellaneous objects at Sloane’s manor house in Chelsea” (Abstract)
Humbel, M., Nyhan, J., Vlachidis, A., Sloan, K. and Ortolja-Baird, A. “Named-entity recognition for early modern textual documents: a review of capabilities and challenges with strategies for the future”, Journal of Documentation, 2021. DOI 10.1108/JD-02-2021-0032
“By mapping-out the capabilities, challenges and limitations of named-entity recognition (NER), this article aims to synthesise the state of the art of NER in the context of the early modern research field and to inform discussions about the kind of resources, methods and directions that may be pursued to enrich the application of the technique going forward” (Abstract).
Ortolja-Baird, A. and Nyhan, J. ‘Encoding the haunting of an object catalogue: on the potential of digital technologies to perpetuate or subvert the silence and bias of the early-modern archive.’ Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (October 2021) OPEN ACCESS. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab065
“Conceptualizing the absence of non-hegemonic individuals from the catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane as an instance of textual haunting, this article will ask: to what extent do data-driven approaches further entrench archival absences and silences? Can digital approaches be used to highlight or recover absent data?” (Abstract)
Downloadable, XML-encoded datasets
The project made five of Sloane’s catalogues available as TEI-XML encoded files. The landing page for the downloadable datasets is here: https://rdr.ucl.ac.uk/collections/Enlightenment_Architectures/5231765
Links to the project Schema and individually downloadable files are as follows:
[A] Nyhan, Julianne (2020): Enlightenment Architectures Project Schema. University College London. Model. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/12672935.v2
[B] K Sloan, J Nyhan, V Pickering, A Ortolja-Baird, M Fleming. Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogue of Fossils including Fishes, Birds, Eggs, Quadrupeds (Volume V). University College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/12971183.v1
[C] Nyhan, Julianne; Ortolja-Baird, Alexandra; Sloan, Kim; Pickering, Victoria; Fleming, Martha (2020): MS 3972B Sloane Manuscript XML. University College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/12689870.v2
[D] Nyhan, Julianne; Sloan, Kim; Ortolja-Baird, Alexandra; Pickering, Victoria; Fleming, Martha (2020): Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogue of Fossils including Coralls, Serpents, Echini, Crustacea, Starrfishes, Humana (Volume I). University College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/12971084.v1
[E] Ortolja-Baird, Alexandra; Nyhan, Julianne; Sloan, Kim; Pickering, Victoria; Fleming, Martha (2020): MS 3972C Vol VI Sloane’s catalogue of books and printed ephemera. University College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/12971372.v1
[F] Sloan, Kim; Nyhan, Julianne; Pickering, Victoria; Ortolja-Baird, Alexandra; Fleming, Martha (2020): Sir Hans Sloane’s Miscellanea which comprises his catalogues of Miscellanies, Antiquities, Seals, Pictures, Mathematical Instruments, Agate Handles and Agate Cups, Bottles, Spoons. University College London. Dataset. [DOI tbc]
Open Access Digital Editions (text and digital images)
The project made five of Sloane’s catalogues available as digital scholarly editions. These five catalogues (Miscellanies, Fossils I, Fossils V, MS 3972C Vol.VI and MS 3972B) represent a selection of Sloane’s extant catalogues from across the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum (London). All three UK national institutions generously contributed to these publications through the intellectual collaboration of their curatorial and other staff, and in the licensing to the project of images of their Sloane catalogue manuscripts as well as the rights to the texts themselves (see Citations and Credits).
A digital edition of MS 3972C Vol VI, Sloane’s catalogue of books and printed ephemera
A digital edition of Sloane MS 3972B of folios listing manuscript material removed from 3972C

Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogues of Miscellanies, Antiquities, Seals, Pictures, Mathematical Instruments, Agate Handles, Agate Cups, Bottles, Spoons

Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogue of Fossils including Coralls, Serpents, Echini, Crustacea, Starrfishes, Humana (Volume I)
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Julianne Nyhan (February 25, 2023). Project round up. Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogues of his Collections (2016-19). Arche Logos. Retrieved June 18, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/bby2





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