The tree of philosophers: design and implementation of a digital resource for the history of academic philosophy

Our contribution is a presentation of the Tree of Philosophers (ToP), a digital resource for the reconstruction of academic family trees in the history of philosophy, resulting from an on-going collaborative effort of historians of philosophy. ToP’s trees represent specific socio-institutional networks of knowledge transmission, as they are made of lines of academic descent that connect philosophers on the basis of institutionalized master-pupil relations. Descent relations are labelled according to specific models varying with historical and institutional contexts, developed in close collaboration with experts in different historical domains. ToP relies on a simple infrastructure whose core is ToP’s relational database, which stores philosophers, relations and labels. ToP data have been retrieved from a variety of institutional and administrative sources, integrated by the examination of professional and biographical sources and by selected parts of available genealogical reconstructions. ToP’s sources and criteria for data collection allow the resource to include large amounts of philosophers regardless of their notability, thus providing access to a massive extra-canonical collection of non-famous authors. Dealing with 15000 philosophers (mostly unknown) in the first release of ToP presented many challenges concerning FAIRification issues. Such issues have been managed by mapping ToP philosophers on external repositories of virtual identifiers for authority data, integrating them in ToP’s database.