Digital Tools and the Chymistry of Isaac Newton

FAIN: RZ-50798-07

Trustees of Indiana University (Bloomington, IN 47405-7000)
John Anthony Walsh (Project Director: November 2006 to February 2011)

Development of digital humanities tools and writing of a scholarly monograph. (36 months).

The Chymistry of Isaac Newton is an integrated digital project for editing, analyzing, and publishing online the approximately 1,000,000 words that Isaac Newton wrote on alchemy/chemistry. Under the technical leadership of John A. Walsh and editorial direction of William R. Newman, the highly collaborative project brings together a team of scholars and digital specialists at Indiana University's Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Digital Library Program, School of Library and Information Science, and Chemistry Department. The focus of this proposal is the development of digital humanities tools that will allow scholars to interact with and manipulate the digitized texts and manuscript images and to produce collaborative scholarship through the use of visualizations and shared annotations. The suite of tools will be tested with other established digital humanities projects, such as the Swinburne Project, and documented and freely distributed under an open source model.