COMPASS

The interdisciplinary research project COMPASS investigated the transfer of maritime and meteorological knowledge from antiquity to modern times. It has identified key terms from natural philosophical treatises, sailing instructions, maps, and logbooks, analyses them across epochs and renders them accessible via a multimedia online compendium. This digital knowledge space linked material and immaterial evidence, extending beyond texts, images and objects, to include ideas, craft techniques and practices such as navigation, weather forecasting, and shipbuilding. 
Through COMPASS, core meteorological concepts became accessible from cross-epochal, cross-cultural, and cross-professional perspectives. The project shed light on questions such as the following: Did sailors in antiquity mean something different by „storm“, „wind“ or „wave“ than their modern counterparts? What polysemantic shifts did words or sign codes undergo in different languages and language families (Greek, Latin, Syro-Aramaic, Arabic, French, English, Spanish, and Dutch)? Who mastered which terms, and through which channels did they circulate among practitioners, scholars and artists?
COMPASS collaborated with national and international research institutions, museums, and libraries. A team of more than 11 researchers, primarily from philosophy, art history, and classical studies, was developing the lemma „wind“ during a conceptual pilot phase. Further entries have been lexically and semantically indexed.