Mission

Most of what is known about the intellectual life of the humanities is known the way weather was known before instruments: by impression, by the memory of the people in the room, by the sense that a field is rising or a tradition has gone quiet. Enrolment is counted, output is counted, rank is counted. What is actually written, how it is received, where it travels and what becomes of it has been left to anecdote. The Institute exists to put a record where the impression was, and to publish what the record shows.

Its principal field is the traffic between Europe and North America, the two scholarly ecosystems that have shaped one another most and are compared least carefully. It begins with philosophy, theology and religious studies, because that is where its collections are deepest, and extends to the other humanities as sources are admitted.

What we research

I · Historical production

What is being written, by whom, where, and in which language: the books, articles and editions that enter the humanistic record each year, with the publisher, the series and the place of publication kept as data. The first question is which thinkers and traditions are receiving new work, and how that has shifted since 2000.

II · Reception

What is reviewed, discussed and cited: the platforms and journals through which a work is actually read, the reviewers who read it, and the attention it receives over time. This is where the collections are deepest. The first question is how long a French book takes to be received in English, and whether that has changed.

III · Transmission

How ideas move between languages, institutions and generations: translation, canon formation, the survival or disappearance of a school. The transatlantic question lives here. The first question is which twentieth-century traditions are still being transmitted, and where.

The Observatory

The Institute’s instrument is a longitudinal research infrastructure, the Humanities Observatory. It captures the review platforms, journals and catalogues through which humanistic knowledge is received, preserves what it captures, resolves the scholars, works, institutions and publishers that appear there into stable entities, and holds the relationships among them as a graph that can be queried across time. It keeps its historical states instead of overwriting them, so that a question asked in 2030 about 2026 gets the 2026 answer. What it holds is set out, source by source, under Collections. Access to the instrument itself is by arrangement.

Method

Preserve evidence. Raw source material and its provenance are retained wherever it is legal and practical to do so, so that every derived observation can be audited back to what was actually captured.

Separate observation from inference. What a source explicitly states is kept distinct from what a machine classified, what an analyst inferred, and what a scholar judged. Each layer is labelled as what it is.

Canonicalise without destroying ambiguity. Scholars, works and institutions receive stable identifiers; their aliases, conflicting evidence, uncertain matches and historical changes are kept alongside them and never flattened away.

Time is first-class data. The Institute preserves historical states, and does not overwrite the past with the present classification or the current affiliation.

Provenance everywhere. Every significant relationship, classification, measurement and claim is traceable to its evidence and to the version of the method that produced it.

Version the method. A change in how something is computed is a new version, announced, with the history re-run.

Claims

The Institute distinguishes four grades of claim, observed, inferred, interpretive and causal, and holds that the stronger and more consequential the claim, the greater the burden of evidence and of human validation it must carry. A causal claim about the life of a tradition requires substantially more than a temporal association or a correlation, and the Institute will say so when it cannot meet that standard.

Independence

Research is governed by scholarly questions and evidence, not by the interests of donors, sponsors, technology providers or institutional partners. Material funding relationships and conflicts of interest are disclosed. Researchers retain control over findings, sponsored research is distinguished from sponsor advocacy, unfavourable findings are published where contract permits, and methodological limitations are published always.

Pluralism

The Institute exists to understand the humanities, not to make conformity to a preferred philosophical, political, religious or methodological position the measure of their health. Disagreement is not pathology. Heterodoxy is not automatically health, and neither is consensus. Traditional scholarship is not automatically healthier, and novelty is not automatically renewal. Popularity is not significance. Where the Institute crosses from description into judgement, it will mark the crossing.

Copyright and access

Each source is admitted under its own terms, recorded at admission. Full text stays inside the instrument where the rights require it; public products use metadata, aggregates and short quotations, each with its page. Where a source has supplied material under agreement, it is cited as the source of every finding drawn from it.