A Galilean Collection of Books and Manuscripts

Abstract

This chapter outlines the challenges of merging the data created from the documents seen in Chapters 1–6. The chapter starts by comparing the data available for analysis with other similar quantitative studies of collections of books. Using a combination of practices from slow metadata and feminist data science, the analyses focus on metadata and paratexts to embrace the ambiguity of the primary sources and read telescopically, that is, by analogy to currently extant books and how they appear in databases. This new data informs a rereading of Galileo’s procurement networks in Chapter 1, the dimensions of the working library as seen in Chapter 2, and the losses from the collection seen in Chapters 3 and 4.