Institutions

Funding

- Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal
- Centro Nacional de Cultura
- CHAM — Centro de Humanidades / Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas/Universidade Nova de Lisboa | Universidade dos Açores
- Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
- Fundação Mário Soares
- Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
- Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

- Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal
- Seminário Livre de História das Ideias / Centro de História d'Aquém e d'Além-Mar
- Fundação Mário Soares

Sponsors

- Biblioteca do Instituto Superior Técnico
- Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra
- Biblioteca Pública Municipal do Porto
- Laboratório Redes de Poder e Relações Culturais
- Seara Nova

Magazines of Ideas and Culture (RIC – Revistas de Ideias e Cultura, ric.slhi.pt) is a programme dedicated to the study and reproduction of 20th century Portuguese magazines. It has been in effect since the early 2000s, and is developed by the Seminário Livre de História das Ideias (www.slhi.pt) in partnership with the Fundação Mário Soares and the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.

RIC is not a project in the commonplace academic institutional sense, but rather a general and open scientific work plan, with well-defined tasks and results.

At the base of the research programme we find:

the realization that magazines of ideas and culture represent primordial sources for 20th century cultural and political history;
the acknowledgement that access to complete collections of these publications is a difficult undertaking, even in eminent institutions;
the fact that the contents of periodicals bring about specific epistemological problems, as a result of their thematic, tonal, and authorial diversity, in addition to the extension and programmatic drift often featured.

We rely on the specific combination of three fields of knowledge for responding to these challenges:

the History of Ideas, sustaining the identification of relevant magazine titles, as well as the interpretation of their contents’ significance;
the Information Sciences, pivotal for a systematic analysis of published materials, both on the descriptive level and in the creation of files, thesauri, and indexes;
the Computer Sciences, providing the necessary instruments for storing and managing images and other data, as well as for constructing and publicizing the final results.

We believe that the websites published so far attest to the possibilities created by this disciplinary confluence, besides representing research and edition examples that conform to the historiographic standards of the Digital Humanities era.

Ref.ª.: UID/HIS/04666/2019 e UIDB/04666/2020

Goals

The general objective is to publish a constellation of online websites that allow mapping the 20th century history of ideas and culture through the study and analysis of the magazines which supported them.

There are three aspects to achieving this goal:

a general website – Revistas de Ideias e Cultura – that contains information on the role of magazines in modern culture and the list of different titles published throughout the 20th century, in Portugal;
websites devoted to specific titles, providing access to complete collections via indexes, and complemented by extensive ancillary documentation;
the possibility of accessing these magazines in a joint and transversal modality, namely by connecting publications and the documentation pertaining to the same intellectual or sensibility movements.

Since the doctrinarian conceptions of the 1900s were shown to be very attractive for thinkers, writers, and artists, the identification of the periodicals that served as their means of expression allows the segmentation of titles according to clear affinities, thus enabling a segmented approach to a public space that tended to be very diverse and complex.

Team

Luís Andrade . Coordenator