Digital|HPS - National Science Foundation

Chymistry of Isaac Newton

jdamerow — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:11:06 +0000

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. Newton's alchemical manuscripts include a rich and diverse set of document types, including laboratory notebooks, indices of alchemical substances, and Newton's transcriptions from other sources."

The Chymistry of Isaac Newton project is based at Indiana University, Bloomington (IUB) and led by Bill Newman of the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science (HPSC). At IUB, the project team also includes individuals from the School of Library and Information Science, the Digital Library Program (DLP), and the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities. Other team members come from the Chemical Heritage Foundation and Johns Hopkins. The DLP serves as our repository and provides hosting and long-term storage for our project site.
Our goal is to create a digital edition of Newton's alchemical manuscripts with full transcriptions and manuscript images in a fully searchable web interface. We have transcribed 118 manuscripts and are in the process of reviewing and releasing those documents to our public site at www.chymistry.org. Nine documents, including three of the largest in the collection, have already been published on the site. We are planning an official release of at least a dozen more documents in April, 2010.

Participants:

William R. Newman, General Editor, Indiana University (wnewman@indiana.edu)

John Walsh, Technical Editor, Indiana University

Wallace Hooper, Project Manager/Programmer/Analyst, Indiana University (whooper@indiana.edu)

James R. Voelkel, Senior Editorial and Encoding Consultant, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Nicolás Bamballi, Editorial Assistant, Indiana University

Timothy Bowman, Web Programmer and Site Architect, Indiana University

Lawrence Glass, Editorial Assistant, Indiana University

Dot Porter, Associate Director for Digital Library Content and Services, Indiana University

Cathrine Reck, Consultant, Indiana University

Kara Alexander, Digital Media Specialist, Indiana University

Michelle Dalmau, Interface and Usability Specialist, Indiana University

Mike Durbin, Infrastructure Programmer/Analyst, Indiana University

Randall Floyd, Programmer/Database Administrator, Indiana University

Julie Hardesty, Interface and Usability Specialist, Indiana University

David Jiao, Programming Consultant, Indiana University

Jenn Riley, Metadata Librarian, Indiana University

Brian Wheeler, System Administrator, Indiana University

Website URL:

http://www.chymistry.org and http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/

Embryo Project

jdamerow — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:08:44 +0000

The Embryo Project helps identify and understand the agents of change shaping embryo research and its multiple contexts. We started from the historical recognition that science involves a mix of contingencies influenced by (1) particular actors working in particular places, (2) decisions about what organisms to study, equipment to use, experiments to design, and other technical factors that make possible scientific practices, and (3) the multiple social and cultural contextual factors that shape what is possible in science.

As the Project has developed, we have focused on identifying and analyzing several defined categories of factors — people, places, organizations, technologies, organisms, concepts, contexts, literature, and images — and their often intricately linked relationships with each other. The Project will make available resources that will address these intertwined relationships and as a result, identify the agents of change at work in the complex arena of embryo research.

To date, we have three kinds of findings in addition to the usual sorts of scholarly publications:

The Science. Because of the way we are examining the science, looking at the different factors as agents of change, we are already seeing things differently than we previously did. Traditional historical work selects from among the vast world of empirical facts to tell a story. Instead, we are telling many smaller stories and are finding that the linking among the pieces is much richer and much more revealing about the multitude of agents shaping scientific change that we had imagined.
The Process. The process of identifying projects and building collaborative networks of researchers who previously did not work together, as well as bringing undergraduate and graduate students and a postdoctoral fellow into the research team has been extraordinary. We each challenge each others' assumptions and already find ourselves asking different questions in different ways than we used to. In addition, we are finding ourselves working as a team that interacts many times a day and learns from each other. This is exciting.
The Encyclopedia. All our work — articles, scholarly interpretive essays, images, videos — is captured and stored in a Fedora repository and the relationships between them can be searched and visualized. This part of the Project is under constant testing and development, with new features and tools planned. The Arizona State University Library, the Marine Biological Laboratory, and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin are collaborating on the technological work.

Published articles related to the Embryo Project:

Maienschein, J. and M. Laubichler. 2010. "The Embryo Project: An Integrated Approach to History, Practices, and Social Contexts of Embryo Research" Journal of the History of Biology 43: 1-16. DOI: 10.1007/s10739-009-9204-1].
Laubichler, M.D., J. Maienschein, and G. Yamashita. 2007. "The Embryo Project and the Emergence of a Digital Infrastructure for History and Philosophy of Science" Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology. 12: 79-96. For a copy of this paper, please contact Manfred Laubichler

Participants:

Jane Maienschein, Director, Center for Biology and Society at ASU (maienschein@asu.edu)

Steve Elliott, Managing Editor, Center for Biology and Society at ASU (stephen.elliott@asu.edu)

Grant Yamashita, Post-Doctoral Fellow and Senior Project Editor, Center for Biology and Society at ASU (Grant.Yamashita@asu.edu)

Karen Wellner, Post-Doctoral Fellow and Education Coordinator, Center for Biology and Society at ASU (Karen.Wellner@asu.edu)

Nathan Crowe, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Center for Biology and Society at ASU (ncrowe@asu.edu)

Erica O'Neil, Editor, Center for Biology and Society at ASU (eloneil@asu.edu)

Tools:

Vogon

Website URL:

http://embryo.asu.edu/

Logo:

Darwin Correspondence Project

eloneil — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 07:40:03 +0000

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.

Participants:

Jim Secord, Director, University of Cambridge (jas1010@cam.ac.uk)

Janet Browne, General Editor, Harvard University

Rosemary Clarkson, Archivist, Cambridge University

Sophie Defrance, Coordinator, Cambridge University (sd260@cam.ac.uk)

Samantha Evans, Editor, Cambridge University (sje25@cam.ac.uk)

Philippa Hardman, Coordinator, Cambridge University

Shelley Innes, Editor, Cambridge University

Alison Pearn, Associate Director, Cambridge University (ab55@cam.ac.uk)

Anne Secord, Editor, Cambridge University (pas6@cam.ac.uk)

Elizabeth Smith, Editor, Cambridge University (els47@cam.ac.uk)

Sally Stafford, Education and Outreach Officer, Cambridge University (srs48@cam.ac.uk)

Paul White, Editor, Cambridge University

Geoff Belknap, Editor, Harvard University

Katie Ericksen Baca, Research Assistant, Harvard University

Meg Formato, Assistant Editor, Harvard University

Myrna Perez, Assistant Editor, Harvard University

Jenna Tonn, Assistant Editor, Harvard University

Andy Corrigan, Cambridge University (acc60@cam.ac.uk)