Projects

Ampere and the History of Electricity

Ampere and the History of Electricity is a primarily French digital project with two historical focuses, the biography of Andre-Marie Ampere (1775-1836) who has been described as the "Newton of electricity" and a more general history of electricity and magnetism. Over 53,400 pages of Ampere's manuscripts are present in the Academy of Sciences' archives and have been digitized. The project offers a sampling of those transcribed and annotated documents.

Archimedes Project

The Archimedes Project aims to develop model interactive environments for scholarly research on the history of mechanics and engineering from antiquity to the Renaissance. It is designed to integrate research and knowledge dissemination in new ways and to serve as a proof-of-concept project for open digital libraries on topics in the history of science.

For more information see http://archimedes.fas.harvard.edu.

Art of Life

The Art of Life project, which has been generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and runs from May 2011-April 2014, seeks to liberate natural history illustrations from the digitized books and journals in the online Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) through development of software tools for automated identification and description of visual resources.

Chymistry of Isaac Newton

Newton's fundamental contributions to science include the quantification of gravitational attraction, the discovery that white light is actually a mixture of immutable spectral colors, and the formulation of the calculus. Yet for Newton was also engaged in the discipline of alchemy, or as it was often called in seventeenth-century England, "chymistry." Newton wrote and transcribed about a million words on the subject of alchemy.

Computational history of chemistry

Computational history of chemistry project is a research that seeks to understand the evolution of chemical knowledge through its formal setting as a dynamical complex system made of the mutual interaction of the material, social and semiotic systems of chemistry. The effects of the expansion of the known chemical substances, of politics, economics and ideologies, and of the chemical language upon the evolution of chemical knowledge are explored through a data-driven perspective.

Darwin Correspondence Project

The Darwin Correspondence Project is a digital endeavor that seeks to transcribe the letters written by Charles Darwin during the course of his lifetime. Over 15,000 correspondences to or from Darwin are included on the website with a brief description. Approximately half of those letters are completely annotated and publicly accessible.

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