Peirce
Interprets
Peirce

A digital humanities project on
Charles S. Peirce's manuscripts

01 — About

Why Peirce,
Why Now

Charles S. Peirce left a vast archive of manuscripts on semiotics, logic, and the philosophy of science — much of it still underexplored.

Advances in OCR/HTR, NLP, and knowledge graphs now make it possible to revisit this archive and surface new insights into Peirce's theory of signs and his universal categories.

02 — Objectives

How We Work

We aim to build a curated, high-fidelity digital corpus of Peirce's manuscripts and analyze linguistic, conceptual, and diagrammatic patterns using AI-driven methods.

  • Transcription Using OCR/HTR to produce accurate digital texts from Peirce's handwritten pages.
  • Analysis Applying NLP and LLMs to detect themes and semiotic structures across the corpus.
  • Knowledge Graph Building a knowledge graph to cross-reference Peirce's concepts and trace their evolution.
  • Visualization Designing interactive tools to make the archive accessible to researchers and the public.
03 — Team

Who We Are

Principal Investigators

Davide Picca

Davide Picca

Principal Investigator
Irene Mittelberg † 2025

Irene Mittelberg † 2025

Co-Principal Investigator
Alessandro Adamou

Alessandro Adamou

Co-Principal Investigator

Research Team

Sebastian Feil

Sebastian Feil

Post-doctoral Researcher
Carlo Teo Pedretti

Carlo Teo Pedretti

PhD Candidate
Lorenzo Zangari

Lorenzo Zangari

Post-doctoral Researcher

Research Partners

Dario Rodighiero

Dario Rodighiero

Research Partner
Jeffrey Schnapp

Jeffrey Schnapp

Research Partner
04 — Partners

Who Supports Us

Partner Institutions

University of Lausanne
RWTH Aachen University
Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute
University of Groningen
MetaLab at Harvard

Advisory Committee

  • Francesco Bellucci Università di Bologna
  • Elize Bisanz Texas Tech University
  • Tiago da Costa e Silva Independent Researcher
  • Maria Giulia Dondero Université de Liège
  • Riccardo Fedriga Università di Bologna
  • Jeffrey F. Hamburger Harvard University
  • Giovanni Maddalena Università del Molise
  • Rocco Monti University of Rome 3
  • Ahti-Veikko Juhani Pietarinen Hong Kong Baptist University
  • Alberto Romele IRMÉCCEN, Sorbonne Nouvelle
  • Joshua K. Schäuble University of Groningen
  • Frederik Stjernfelt Aalborg University
  • Tullio Viola University of Maastricht
  • Cornelis de Waal Indiana University
05 — Output

Publications