On Monday morning Janux, OU’s new digital course platform, launches with the following courses, all of which offer free public enrollment:

• Native Peoples of Oklahoma
• Practical Importance of Human Evolution
• Chemistry of Beer
• Understanding and Detecting Deception
• Power and Elegance of Computational Thinking
• Introduction to Computer Programming
• Administration of Adult and Higher Education
• Introduction to Water
• Hydraulic Fracturing and Water Resources
• Physical Geology for Science and Engineering Majors
• History of Science to the Age of Newton
• Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
• Introduction to Sociology

Go on over to the janux.ou.edu site and take a look. Sign up for any that interest you. On Monday morning, join thousands of other people around the world who will interact together as they explore these courses.

The Janux platform offers numerous features tailored to promote engaging learning opportunities, including text annotations, student interaction through forum discussions, and high-impact videos including interviews and on-location documentaries. Courses range the gamut across the sciences and humanities, offering anyone around the world access, without charge, to the intellectual resources of the University of Oklahoma.

One reason posting to this blog has lagged in recent months is because the Janux platform will include my own course, History of Science to the Age of Newton. But the truth is that this course no longer seems really my own: It began with the interested support of Dean Rick Luce and my colleagues in the Department of the History of Science, who encouraged me to engage the platform even during a time when we have other significant, large-scale digital initiatives afoot. It has been produced by a team of remarkable people with whom I have been privileged to work, whose skill and graciousness have inspired me. My debts to them are inestimable: Angie Calton, course design assistant; Grey Allman and the programming team, who have slaved away many late nights to implement new platform features to support high-quality online pedagogy; and Chris Kalinsky and the rest of the videography team (Meleah, Pat, Matt, Darren, & Jaynan), who are artists of light and shadow and have invested extended hours in filming the books – those treasures from the vault – on location in the History of Science Collections. Without their insight, initiative, skill, dogged labors, teamwork, collegiality and perseverance, my course would not be included in that list.

The launch of Janux is an exciting time for OU and for all of those involved. My hat is off to everyone who made it possible, and now the countdown to Monday morning begins…

“The currently available digital copies of Darwin’s great work suffer serious defects from the point of view of both human and machine readers.” (Goldstein, editor’s introduction)

Adam M. Goldstein, of Iona College, has created a structured source text of Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (London, 1859). Here is the link to download a digital edition of the source text, in pdf (6.4MB), at the American Museum of Natural History website:

http://darwin.amnh.org/files/images/pdfs/e83461.pdf

The source text underlying this edition was produced by editing, correcting, and reformatting the Oxford Text Archive’s text number 1783. In the editor’s introduction, Goldstein relays the results of an initial proof-reading of the 1783 text by Eric English:

“The base text (text 1783) is rife with errors, approximately 1,000 of them identified during the first round of proofreading. Some seem to be typographical errors or errors of transcription, and some of these significantly alter the meaning of the text: missing words, a variant of a word differing in meaning from the correct word; missing punctuation; and, most startling, missing phrases or sentences. The base text is Anglicized in some cases, Americanized in others. For instance, “organization” and “organisation” both appear regularly in the base text, and double quotes where Americans today would expect them are frequently changed to single quotes in a manner that accords with today’s British practice. Additionally, no diphthongs, ampersands, or accented characters appear anywhere in text 1783. Dashes, commas, and semicolons are often deleted or misplaced. Superscripts, subscripts, and mathematics are either deleted or incorrectly represented.”

This edition rectifies these issues, creating a nearly word-for-word replica of the 1859 edition. As Goldstein states in his introduction: “The central principle informing the editorial practices used in production of the digital Origin is that the text be presented in a manner as close to its original rendering as possible….” Features which still differ from the original text (for example, the lack of running heads) are identified in the editor’s introduction.

Goldstein expresses the hope that this new source text will “provide a basis in machine-readable code for producing the text of the 1859 Origin in a range of designs, for instance, a large-type edition for the visually impaired, or an edition formatted for reading on a hand-held device.” In addition, the source text is structured to support machine analysis. Goldstein envisions the creation of an appropriate informatics tool that will enable scholars to analyze this source text of the Origin more powerfully than is possible through basic key word searching. Not only is this pdf the most accurate digital copy of the Origin to date, but Goldstein’s preparation of the structured source text underlying the pdf is an important step toward the application to the Darwin corpus of analytical techniques adapted from informatics.

This is the first version of this digital edition; revisions will be posted at the same link. At present, the AMNH site is the only authorized distribution point; refer users to the link above rather than distributing the file itself.

Notes about the edition:

• The editor’s introduction is an invaluable guide to the technical ins and outs of making an accurate digital edition and a sustainable encoded source text. It discusses the edition’s necessity and methodology.
• The pdf includes a hyperlinked table of contents and two hyperlinked indices, one that refers to the pagination of the edition in hand, the other to Darwin’s original Origin pagination. The latter is more accurate than the index in Ernst Mayr’s facsimile edition.

A copyright mark appears on every page of the pdf. Goldstein explains that the document is available under the terms set by the AMNH for use of material on the Darwin Manuscripts Project site. He intends eventually to release the source text under the GNU GPL, but that’s taking a little time to work out.

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The OU History of Science Collections is providing high resolution facsimile images of Darwin first editions to the Darwin Manuscripts Project of the American Museum of Natural History. For more about the OU Darwin collection, see Darwin First Editions and Darwin@theLibrary.

The astrolabe was the most important scientific instrument in the Middle Ages, and the treatise ascribed to Masha’allah (ca 800 C.E., but not actually by him) is the most important text on the subject. It was much copied and survives in all or in part in almost 200 manuscripts. Generally there are more than 100 copies of each part of the treatise.

The 1935 edition published by R. T. Gunther was based on only three or four local manuscripts, and as such is defective in many places. Missing phrases, or mis-copies or mis-read phrases at times makes that text unintelligible.

This edition is based on the collation of a significant number of manuscripts (over 80, and eventually, it is hoped, all manuscript copies). What is now being published here is the text of the Prologue and of the first six chapters. The edition is available in four PDF files:

• Part I: Introduction contains the preface and introductory material, including manuscript information;
• Part II: Critical Edition contains the Latin text and diagrams, the critical apparatus and a facing English translation;
• Part III: Latin Text contains the Latin text and diagrams, without the apparatus criticus, but maintaining the line numbers of the critical edition;
• Part IV: English Text contains the English text and diagrams, for those who are interested in consulting only the translation.

Over time these texts will be updated and expanded, when the remaining manuscript copies are collated, and when the editing of further sections has been completed. However, it is not expected that the present version will change – the rest of the manuscripts will expand the apparatus criticus but are unlikely to modify the text itself.

The proper citation of this work is: Pseudo-Masha’allah, On the Astrolabe, ed. Ron B. Thomson, version 1.0 (Toronto, 2012).

The editor is interested in receiving comments on the text and further insights into its interpretation from others. He is willing to incorporate such additions into future versions for the benefit of others who would consult this edition in the future. Comments can be sent to [email protected].

Permission is given for scholars to print out (and bind) any or all of these texts for non-commercial uses: research, study, criticism and citation. Commercial reproduction of all or part of the texts is not permitted without the prior consent of the copyright owner.

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Note: We thank Prof. Thomson for this guest post, and for making this important edition available to scholars in electronic form as downloadable pdfs from ouhos.org. Bookmark this page to obtain future versions of Prof. Thomson’s edition. Should it become available elsewhere, this page will forward visitors to the most current location.

John van Wyhe, editor of the Darwin Online project, today announced the opening of the Wallace Online project, three years in the making.

Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913) is well-known as a co-discoverer, with Charles Darwin, of the theory of descent with modification from common ancestors by natural selection. Wallace was also of major importance for the development of ecology, particularly through his extensive explorations of southeast Asia and Malaysia (cf. Wyhe’s biographical essay).

The University of Oklahoma Libraries is glad to announce its partnership with the Wallace Online project. The History of Science Collections has contributed the following books:

• Wallace, A. R. 1875. On miracles and modern spiritualism. Three essays. London: James Burns.
• Wallace, A. R. 1907. Is Mars habitable? A critical examination of Professor Percival Lowell’s Book “Mars and its canals,” with an alternative explanation. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd. And New York: The Macmillan Co.
• Wallace, A. R. 1913. Social environment and moral progress. London, New York, Toronto & Melbourne: Cassell & Co., Ltd.

Also, the History of Science Collections is the leading external contributor to Darwin Online, contributing 40 titles to that project (see related post).

(Source)

The Berlin Declaration is a guiding document for the Editions Open Access and the Digital HPS initiatives mentioned on this blog before. The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, which has played a leading role in crafting and disseminating the open access principles of the Berlin Declaration, is also the sponsor of The Archimedes Project, one of the leading digital libraries for the history of the scientific revolution.

The freely accessible Manuscriptorium digital library, the designated platform for the European Digital Library of Written Cultural Heritage, provides access to more than 5 million images, at present, of manuscripts, incunabula, early printed books, maps, deeds, charters and more, up to the year 1800. These historical resources, otherwise scattered in various digital libraries around the world, are now accessible under a single digital library interface.

“The [Manuscriptorium] user interface is designed for easy searching and viewing of documents and it enables the creation of personal collections and virtual documents. This means users and contributors of content can create their own virtual libraries from the aggregated content and share the results of their work with students, colleagues and other users.”
(more)

Sponsored by the National Library of the Czech Republic and ENRICH (European Networking Resources and Information concerning Cultural Heritage), the Manuscriptorium project coordinates access to digitized resources produced by collaborating partners at many renowned institutions, extending beyond the countries of the European Union.

Libraries Website: EBSCO Discovery Service

Now it is even easier for us at OU to find and access items in the Manuscriptorium project. Items from Manuscriptorium are now accessible by searching the Libraries website. The metadata that makes Manuscriptorium items turn up in the OU Libraries online catalog is provided by the EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS). Nor is Manuscriptorium the only resource included in catalog searching, courtesy of EDS:

“The Manuscriptorium joins a long list of key information sources available to EBSCO Discovery Service users including: British Library, Baker & Taylor, NewsBank, Readex, LexisNexis, Alexander Street Press, Oxford University Press, American Psychological Association, ABC-CLIO, ingentaconnect, Government Printing Office, ECONIS, Mergent Inc., arXiv, Credo Reference, IGI Global, World Book and Accessible Archives. In addition, Web of Science & H.W. Wilson provide access for mutual customers. The EDS Base Index represents content from approximately 20,000 providers (and growing) in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers, representing far more content providers and publishers than any other discovery service.

EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customized index of an institution’s information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box—searching made even more powerful because of the quality of metadata and depth and breadth of coverage.” (more)

Follow these steps:

1. Go to the University Libraries website, and log-in with your 4×4.

2. Click in the Articles field and enter your search text (for example, “De revolutionibus”).

3. Click “Go.” In the resulting hit list, provided by the EBSCO Discovery Service, you will see “View this record from Manuscriptorium” links within the EBSCOhost interface.

4. Click the link to go to that item in Manuscriptorium.

For help, see the Searching Databases tutorial at the Libraries website, or come in and ask us for a demonstration.

So take your pick: If you wish, access Manuscriptorium directly, or by searching the Libraries online catalog.

Related post: Searching the Libraries catalog.

The History of Science Collections of the University of Oklahoma Libraries has received the following letter from John van Wyhe, Director of Darwin Online, hosted by Cambridge University:

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The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online (or Darwin Online) is the largest and most widely consulted edition of the writings of Darwin ever published. The website contains over 91,000 pages of searchable text and 209,000 electronic images. This includes at least one exemplar of all known Darwin publications, reproduced to the highest scholarly standards, both as searchable text and electronic images of the originals. The majority of these have been edited and annotated for the first time with thousands of original editorial notes.

More copies of Darwin’s works have been downloaded from Darwin Online than have been printed by all publishers of the past 180 years combined. The website has received well over 100 million hits in the last five years.

The website also provides the largest collection of Darwin’s private papers and manuscripts ever published: c. 20,000 items in c. 100,000 images, thanks primarily to the kind permission of Cambridge University Library. Thus Darwin Online makes available not only Darwin’s published science, but the notes and data collected to create it.

Although Darwin Online is by far the most complete collection of Darwin’s writings, there are still many gaps in the ambious scope of its coverage – such as different editions and variants and particularly in the vast number of foreign translations that have been published. The majority of the large number of visitors to the website come from non-English speaking countries, which testifies to the need for Darwin’s writings to be available in as many languages as possible.

Of the more than 200 volumes reproduced on Darwin Online, thirty-seven are from the History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries. This makes the OU History of Science Collections the largest single contributor of scanned Darwin books, and particularly foreign translations. So far works by Darwin have been supplied in French, German, Italian and Yiddish. These books have been reproduced as beautiful colour images which have already been viewed by tens of thousands of readers around the world.

Thus the OU collections, in addition to their normal use by readers and researchers, find vast new audiences by virtue of their inclusion in the world’s largest collection of Darwiniana. This collaboration is clearly of enormous value to scholars and the general public.

I am very excited by the opportunity to fill so many gaps in the online collection. I should think that such an example of collegial co-operation and partnership will set an example that other institutions will envy and perhaps follow.

Naturally all of the digital images carry an indication of their provenance and the University of Oklahoma Libraries is fully acknowledged both on the individual electronic images, and the books are listed a second time on a webpage listing the works contributed, so generously, by the History of Science Collections.

With my enthusiastic thanks and best wishes,

John van Wyhe
Director, The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

More than First Editions

To view all of Charles Darwin’s printed volumes in their first editions yields an unforgettable impression of the breadth and beauty of Darwin’s work. However, to support research, the Collections holds far more than just the first editions, for scholars need to see how editions of works were changed, and how translations differ. Darwinism in Germany was different than Darwinism in France or England or America, so hundreds of editions and translations have been collected. One unusual example is Darwin, Die Opshtamung fun Menschen (New York, 1926 [vol. title 1923]; The Descent of Man in Yiddish), F1139.

Another is a Norwegian edition of Origin of Species (1890) which is not listed in the Freeman Bibliography.

The Portrait collections include several depictions of Darwin, including a Darwin caricature from Vanity Fair magazine (Sept 30, 1871).

Also available in the History of Science Collections are the journals in which Darwin published his articles, the works of Darwin’s contemporaries and recent books about Darwin that support current scholarship in the history of science. With the resources of the Darwin Collection at your fingertips, the History of Science Collections of the University of Oklahoma Libraries offers an ideal place to read and study Charles Darwin.

More than Printed Works

Through making its holdings available through Landmarks of Science and various digital projects, the purpose of the History of Science Collections is to facilitate research in the University of Oklahoma Libraries and beyond.

The Collections holds four handwritten Darwin letters:

1. 1864-Feb22
2. 1869-Jan23
3. 1869-Oct7
4. 1870-Feb24

The Collections are making available the enhanced ePub versions of works in the history of geology prepared by Robert Cody. So far, these ePubs include Darwin’s work on coral reefs.

OU is a major contributor to Cambridge University’s Darwin Online. Having provided digital versions of nearly 40 obscure editions, the Collections’ contribution is second only to Cambridge itself. More on this in the next post…. Meanwhile:

Read more about the Galleries, browse the Darwin first editions, and view a list of additional Digitized Books.

Charles Darwin’s 22 printed volumes are listed below in chronological order, linked to high resolution versions in the University of Oklahoma Libraries History of Science Collections’ Online Galleries:

1. Darwin, Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle, vol. 1 (F8.1), vol. 2 (F8.2), vol. 3 (F8.3) (1838-43). More info.
2. Darwin, Journal of Researches (1839), F11.
• For an illustrated edition, see: Darwin, Journal of Researches (Voyage of the Beagle, 1890 edition), F64.
3. Darwin, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842), F271.
4. Darwin, Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands (1844), F272.
5. Darwin, Geological Observations on South America (1846), F273.
6. Darwin, Monograph on the Sub-Class Cirripedia: The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes (1851), F339.1.
7. Darwin, Monograph on the Sub-Class Cirripedia: The Balanidae (or Sessile Cirripedes); The Verrucidae, etc. (1854), F339.2.
   • See also: Darwin and Wallace, Three papers on natural selection (1858)
8. Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), F373.
9. Darwin, On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (1862), F800.
10. Darwin, Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, 2 vols. (1868), vol. 1, F878.1 and vol. 2, F878.2.
11. Darwin, Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to Sex, 2 vols. (1871), vol. 1, F937.1.; and vol. 2, F937.2.
12. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), F1142.
13. Darwin, Insectivorous Plants (1875), F1218.
14. Darwin, Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants (1875), F836.
15. Darwin, Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876), F1249.
16. Darwin, Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species (1877), F1277.
17. Darwin, Power of Movement in Plants (1880), F1325.
18. Darwin, Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms (1881), F1357.

Bibliographic note:
With the exception of the Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, all Darwin first editions were published in London by John Murray. An exact description for each title can be found using the indicated Freeman number (F#), which refers to its entry in the Freeman Bibliography, the standard description for Darwin editions.

Additional volume:

• Ernst Krause, Erasmus Darwin. Translated from the German by W.S. Dallas. With a Preliminary Notice by Charles Darwin. London, John Murray, 1879.
  This work, although cataloged under Krause (consistent with Krause’s top billing on the title page), contains a 126-page “preliminary notice” by Charles Darwin on the life of his grandfather, Erasmus. Krause’s own essay is only 86 pages, so the majority of the work is actually by Charles Darwin.

Published posthumously:
Darwin, Life and Letters, 3 vols. (1887):

• vol. 1 (incl. Autobiography), F1453.1;
• vol. 2, F1453.2;
• vol. 3, F1453.3.

What is a “first edition”?
Any attempted numerical count of Darwin first editions swiftly encounters ambiguities. Here are a few of the questions that arise:

2. Should posthumous works be included? Darwin’s Autobiography was not published during his lifetime, but first published along with his letters – the total is 23 if you count that, or 25 if you count all 3 volumes of the Life and Letters that includes the Autobiography. To have it both ways, we have chosen to place these 3 volumes on display in the Darwin@the Libraries exhibit, although we are not counting them among the 22 volumes published by Darwin himself.

3. Does “first edition” imply “first edition in book form”? When we offer 22 as the numerical count, we’re not including Darwin’s more than 200 articles, chapters and short essays. Yet the line between articles and printed volumes often blurs. For example, one book-length work was first published as an article in a journal (not on display) and then reprinted as a book (on display, #14 above). Which one is the “first edition”? Or should we include Darwin’s “preliminary notice” to Krause’s biography of Erasmus Darwin, since Darwin’s contribution makes up the majority of the published book?

4. Should one count titles or volumes? The list above includes 18 titles in 22 volumes. Yet the Zoology (#1 above) was issued over six years in 19 numbered parts. In this respect, it was more like a journal than a book. Afterward, the printer gave instructions for binding the 19 parts in either 3 or 5 volumes. The OU copy is bound in 3 volumes, but the count would be increased by 2 if we happened to hold a copy of the very same pages bound in 5 volumes.

So the idea of counting Darwin first editions is not as straightforward as it sounds. Does your count equal ours?

Regardless of how you count them, come see them all in the Darwin@the Library exhibit.

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Read more about the OU Darwin Collection, about the Online Galleries and view a list of additional Digitized Books.

The Research Library of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science has launched a new publishing initiative: Edition Open Access.

With a strong editorial board to oversee publications and peer review, this initiative provides a venue for publication that is reputable for scholars as well as convenient for readers. It will facilitate rapid publication of scholarly editions of primary Sources, article-length Essays, conference Proceedings and monographs and thematic Studies. Usage rights are in accord with the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

Convenient access is offered by:

• Printed copies at an affordable price (about $25) from epubli, Amazon and other booksellers;
• Free PDF download for individual annotating, organizing and self-printing;
• Free ePub download for use with ebook readers, iPhones and iPads (see our introduction to ebooks).

The Max Planck Institute explains:

Based on and extending the functionalities of the existing open access repository European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO), this initiative aims at a model for an unprecedented, web-based scientific working environment integrating access to information with interactive features. (About)

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What needs do open-access publishing ventures meet?

• Is your scholarly monograph being published at a price that is affordable?
• Is it published rapidly?
• Can readers access it conveniently on their ebook readers and on their computers, as well as in a printed format?
• As an editor or collaborator, would you and your fellow authors benefit from a web-based working environment?

With publication costs rising, even libraries can no longer afford all the weighty tomes they might once have acquired. Unfortunately, many works end up being unread by those who would otherwise find them worthwhile. To publish at ever-increasing costs to reach an ever-diminishing audience is not sustainable. Something has to give.

Many writers choose to put their work online, and some have reported that the widespread reader interest generated by making a work available for free paradoxically increased the sales of the same work in printed format.

Yet scholars have additional needs beyond affordability and convenient access. Scholarship receives a measure of validation by passing through a rigorous process of peer-review before publication. Traditionally, peer review has been overseen by publishers, but now an increasing number of professional societies and institutions are offering peer-reviewed, open access publication. Max Planck Open Access Editions promises to become one of the leading examples of open-access scholarly publication in the history of science.

ProQuest has announced that they are scanning 15,500 volumes from the Wellcome Library for Early European Books Online, which comprises the entire holdings of the Wellcome’s books printed before 1700.

The collection contains many rare or obscure texts on subjects ranging from alchemy to zoology, and includes many of the most spectacularly illustrated books of the period. Landmark works include the first edition of anatomist Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543) [already available from OU in high resolution here], the complete works of surgeon Ambroise Paré (c.1510-1590), Rabanus Maurus’s encyclopedia De sermonum proprietate (1467), whose medical section is sometimes called the first printed medical book, and a beautiful colored copy of Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicarum (‘The Nuremberg Chronicle’, 1493), formerly owned by the artist William Morris (1834-1896). In addition to complementing the English works already digitized as part of ProQuest’s Early English Books Online database, the new resource will provide access to important continental editions of works by famous English medical authors, such as William Harvey’s seminal work on the circulation of the blood, De motu cordis (1628), which was first published in Germany.

Additional collaborating libraries in the Early European Books Online project include the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen; the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in Italy; and the National Library of the Netherlands. These collections include, for example, notable works by Tycho Brahe, Johann Kepler and many others of interest to historians of science.

Most historians of science are already familiar with Early English Books Online:

Early English Books Online contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.

Many of us have personalized our OU Libraries web page to include EEBO as a quick link (as shown, right); here’s how. We can now add Early European Books as a quick link, too.

With Early European Books Online, ProQuest is expanding upon EEBO by including titles in Latin and other European languages.

For more information consult the ProQuest press release here. For additional digital projects, click the Digital projects link in the right margin.

The website features links to items related to “Early Anatomy,” the “Golden Age of Flap Books,” “Women (and Babies),” “Under Lock and Key,” and the “Technology of Flap Books,” as well as videos, links, a bibliography and symposium abstracts, and a short essay on the kidney in flap books by Michael McVaugh.

View the online exhibit website here.

One of the many fascinating items featured in this exhibit is a beautiful, hand-colored copy of Georg Bartisch, Ophthalmodouleia (1583), included in the “Early Anatomy” section, with additional images from the Duke copy here and on the Diapsalmata blog here.

To examine Bartisch’s work in more detail, view it in its entirety in high resolution images from the OU History of Science Collections Online Galleries here.

The digital images are accessible via the following databases:

• Digital Collections of the BSB
• BSB OPAC
• BSB catalogue of incunabula
• Bavarian Union Catalogue / Gateway Bayern
• Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz
• Incunabula Short Title Catalogue of the British Library London

For more information about this project, contact Dr. Bettina Wagner, Abteilung fuer Handschriften und Alte Drucke, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Muenchen, Germany.

Click here for a list of the incunabula held by the OU History of Science Collections, several of which are available in the Online Galleries.

The Medical Heritage Library promotes open access to historical resources in medicine, with 8,500 volumes currently available and more being added on an almost daily basis.

Medical Heritage Library partners are currently scanning history of medicine printed materials using a grant from the Sloan Foundation and Open Knowledge Commons. Files are currently being deposited in the Internet Archive, accessed here: http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary.

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Digitized books in the history of medicine that are available in high resolution from the OU Online Galleries include the following:

• Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia (Bononiae, 1570); contains examples of birth defects.
• Bartisch, Ophthalmodouleia (Dresden, 1583); earliest printed work devoted to diseases of the eye.
• Fuchs, De historia stirpium (Basel, 1542); early printed herbal. Hand-colored.
• Gerard, The Herball: or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597); early printed herbal. Hand-colored.
• Harvey, The Anatomical exercises of Dr. William Harvey (London, 1653); first English edition.
• Jenner, An Inquiry Into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae (London, 1798)
• Mondino Dei Luzzi, Anothomia (Venice, 1507); medieval manual for human dissection.
• Tyson, Edward, The Anatomy of a Pygmy (London, 1751); comparative anatomy of human and chimpanzee.
• Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel, 1543); early modern anatomy.

One tip is to click the “Digital Projects” tab in the right margin of this blog to see descriptions of various online projects that might be helpful to you in your research. We’ll continue to add many more projects to this category in the coming weeks; send us your recommendations for online projects that you have found helpful.

But wouldn’t it be much more convenient if there were one website that could provide a federated search of all of these distributed projects, so that you could search once and find results all over the web? The good news is that just such a web portal is coming soon with help from the National Science Foundation.

Since 2008, a digital consortium in the history and philosophy of science (HPS) has been meeting regularly to lay the groundwork for a unified web portal (cf. the OU page on the Digital HPS website). One year ago, for example, a Digital HPS Initiative Summit was held at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, February 25-28, 2010, to map out a detailed plan for a distributed digital infrastructure and to produce a grant proposal to prepare a new HPS website at MBL to host the portal.

The first step in creating the portal is an Informatics HPS Boot Camp for digital projects in the history of science, modeled on the bioinformatics week-long bootcamps for biologists held every summer at MBL. The HPS Boot camp will be held at the MBL from May 23-26, 2011, led by library scientists and informaticians. The stated agenda is to solve the following problem:

“We each have diverse experiences in using multiple databases that are set up in different ways and the lack of infrastructural support for making these projects accessible and inter-operable presents a stumbling block to advancing both our projects and the field as a whole. As we seek to set up our own databases to achieve true “broader impacts” and to take our work to the larger publics, we have each encountered the challenges of doing it alone. In fact, many projects often work in isolation, and this means that there are many small historical projects inhabiting dark unexplored corners of the internet that are effectively lost to scholars. Or, they are found, but since they utilize proprietary data formats, do not have metadata, or run on outdated systems, they are not easily utilized by others.”

The Digital HPS consortium is working on other projects as well. For example, a Digital Editing Workshop will be held at the Einstein Papers Project, California Institute of Technology, April 14-17, 2011.

Just as biologists have embraced new methods of research with the rise of bioinformatics, so historians of science are witnessing transformative changes in research methods. The next decade will be an exciting time for online research in the history of science!

The metadata-enhanced images are organized for browsing in parallel directories according to (1) period, (2) author and (3) date of publication, as explained here:
http://ouhos.org/2010/06/03/how-to-browse-the-image-galleries/

We will digitize entire books when requested by a collaborating project, when distinctive characteristics of the OU copy of a work warrant its digitization, or when the work contains a large number of detailed plates that make existing low-quality versions insufficient. The galleries include over 130 books digitized in their entirety, listed here:
http://ouhos.org/2010/06/19/digitized-books/
Examples of digitized books include Regiomontanus, Kalendarium (1476); Vesalius, De fabrica (1543); Agricola, De re metallica (1556); Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum historia (1570); Gerard’s Herball (1597); Hooke’s Micrographia (1665); the celestial atlases of Bayer (1661) and Bode (1801); William Smith’s geological map of England and Wales (1815); and Darwin’s Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle, vol. 1, vol. 2, and vol. 3 (1838-43).

The non-copyrighted images are offered with generous terms of use, although attribution is required:
http://ouhos.org/2010/06/03/images-terms-of-use/

To add interest to browsing the galleries, there are several rotating content galleries:

• Featured Books: a rotating selection of digitized books (cf. complete list).
• Featured Manuscripts: images from a rotating selection of Collections’ handwritten manuscripts, currently including a Samurai manual and “Memoirs of Niels Bohr” by Jens Rud Nielsen.
• Featured Pages: by various authors in a number of subjects.

We hope these rotating galleries will put some of the most interesting new digitized items at your fingertips and make it more convenient for you to discover colorful and exciting new images.

For more information, see the History of Science Collections blog:
http://ouhos.org/

OU participates in a consortium of collaborating institutions for digital projects in the history of science, and has contributed books to some of these projects. For more information, click the Digital Projects category in the right margin of this blog.

Access the Archimedes project here.

The screenshot above shows a list of available sources, in this case of texts in the category of Renaissance engineers. Available sources are listed in two categories: Digital texts and Digital facsimiles. Digital texts are works that have been processed to include searchable text and other features implemented through machine-automated XML tagging and other forms of markup. The ideal is a work that consists of both high quality images and processed text.

The screenshot above shows the first page of Agricola’s De re metallica (1556), a work for which high quality images are needed. (These images recently have been supplied by the OU History of Science Collections; cf. our list of digitized books.)

Searchable text has been produced by the Archimedes project’s powerful OCR technology. The Archimedes OCR technology is optimized for the varied typography found in early printed books and works effectively with non-Roman languages.

Clicking the brown page icon (located top-right, immediately to the left of the “search” link) opens a facsimile image page for comparison with the searchable text pane.

Advanced Usability features

The Archimedes project becomes particularly innovative in its implementation of advanced usability features to make the texts interactive, rather than being restricted to the passive functions of typical web browsing.

User Annotations

First, the Archimedes project supports user annotation of both illustrations and texts within the web browser.

Image annotations: For example, users may mark up illustrations. Agricola is noted for its remarkable illustrations. The screenshot above shows two user-added markers to indicate features of an illustration (note the little red numbers 1 and 2). I added these two markers from within a web browser while viewing page 135 of the work. After adding such markers, a student or scholar may share the illustration with the same zoom size and markers (click here to open this screen at the Archimedes Project website). The Archimedes Project software supplies a stable link that points to the image at the selected resolution, together with its annotations. This image markup feature allows users to interact with images in a collaborative manner.

Text annotations: The Archimedes Project also supports annotations of individual words and groups of words within texts. Source texts remain unchanged, while multiple users create their own independent sets of annotated texts, which they may share with other scholars and students.

Annotation is possible even when “terms” consist of multiple associated words, which may be discontinuous or interlaced with each other. That is, “overlay tagging” (unlike XML) enables overlapping “terms” to be marked individually. In addition, corresponding “terms” in parallel may be suggested by the software based upon the co-occurrence of words, and edited in user-defined “term lists.” Texts are Unicode based, with support for non-Roman characters including Greek, Arabic and Chinese.

The screenshot above shows three panes in parallel containing different editions of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, where a search for a term in a Greek text (left column) has identified the corresponding terms in the two parallel Latin translations. (Screenshot by Mark Schiefsky.)

Interactive features like these change the way scholarship is performed.

Morphological Searching

The Archimedes Project supports sophisticated morphological searching of texts. With morphological searching, a word as it appears in a text is automatically analyzed into its dictionary form and part of speech. For example, if a user searches the Greek text of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry for “isópleuros,” the search can return any or all of the forms shown below:

Morphological analysis is currently available for texts in Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian and Latin; support for further languages is in development.

Morphological searching requires sophisticated linguistic technology, including online dictionaries and automated machine-generated markup of source texts. The Archimedes Project is able to support morphological searching only because of the decades long development of the underlying linguistic technology by the Perseus Digital Library of classical texts.

This post about the technological innovations of the Archimedes project has focused upon the client side, the features presented to the user. However, the project has also created development tools, including image viewers and annotating applications, to facilitate the markup of texts and images consistent with TEI and RDF standards.

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin hosts a number of other history of science digital projects on topics including Chinese science, cuneiform science, Galileo, quantum physics, and biological experimentation. These projects will also benefit from the technical expertise being developed in the Archimedes project.

The OU History of Science Collections are making available, through the efforts of Robert D. Cody, enhanced ePub versions of historic texts in geology, including works by Hutton, Playfair, Smith, Lyell, Darwin and others. Self-guided exhibit tours are in development using the immersive, multimedia ebook format produced by iBooks Author.

Why ebooks?

Most publishers now offer ebooks as an option for many of their titles. Amazon and other retailers report that ebook sales have already surpassed the sales of hardcover books and of paperback books.

“Amazon began selling hardcover and paperback books in July 1995. Twelve years later in November 2007, Amazon introduced the revolutionary Kindle and began selling Kindle books. By July 2010, Kindle book sales had surpassed hardcover book sales, and six months later, Kindle books overtook paperback books to become the most popular format on Amazon.com. Today, less than four years after introducing Kindle books, Amazon.com customers are now purchasing more Kindle books than all print books – hardcover and paperback – combined.” Amazon news release, May 19, 2011

Update 5/2012: Pew Research Center, “The Rise of E-Reading”; summarized visually by Online Universities (at bottom of this post).

Book reader of the future (1935); Smithsonian

Finding ebooks

Millions of free ePub books, including thousands of primary sources in the history of science, are available from the following non-commercial sources:

• Project Gutenberg
• Google
• epubBooks.com
• The Online Books Page
• Feedbooks
• Internet Archive – Texts
• ManyBooks.net
• More free e-books

New to ebooks?

Read ePub books in ebook software for various ereader devices:

• Adobe Digital Editions for PC or Mac
• iBooks app for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch; iBooks Author for Mac
• Sony ereaders
• Barnes & Noble Nook
• Stanza for iOS devices and Mac
• Calibre an ereader, editor and format converter for Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Various other ereaders

All the devices listed above use the ePub format, the open standard for ebooks. For the Amazon Kindle, see note below.

Want more information?

• Try this review of ePub readers.
• Here’s a peer-reviewed, article-length analysis of ebooks and the publishing industry: “Non–traditional book publishing,” by Jana Bradley, Bruce Fulton, Marlene Helm, and Katherine A. Pittner. First Monday, Volume 16, Number 8 – 1 August 2011.
• For a general introduction and discussion of ebooks, check out Michael Pastore, 50 Benefits of Ebooks: A Thinking Person’s Guide to the Digital Reading Revolution (Zorba Press, October 2010), available in paperback, pdf and ePub formats ($3.99 from the iBookstore).

ePub features

ePub is much more than taking your favorite ebook with you to the pub; rather, ePub is the most popular non-proprietary ebook format (readable by every ebook device except the Kindle). Each ePub text is comprised of a bundle of XHTML files, which ensures that the ePub standard is a long-term, sustainable format.

Enhanced ePub texts may support the following features:

• Hyperlinked tables of contents, footnotes, indices
• Text search
• Bookmarks
• Highlighting
• Marginal comments & annotations
• Embedded images (color and black & white)
• Resizable text, changeable font
• Customizable background color and adjustable brightness
• Hyperlinks to the internet, a dictionary, or Wikipedia
• Embedded audio, video
• Embedded metadata

Be on the lookout for enhanced ePub texts to become more common as publishers begin to take advantage of the ePub’s inherent support for these methods of content enhancement.

Some ePub readers, such as iBooks, also offer additional conveniences such as pdf support; instant on; automatic sync between devices; opening to the page last viewed.

Additional nonstandard enhancements to the ePub format are possible for ebooks prepared with the free iBooks Author application for Mac OS X. These books offer immersive, multimedia experiences, along with enhanced features to facilitate student study such as review questions, slideshows, widgets, and capabilities for integrating note taking, flash cards and glossaries (cf. iBooks textbooks). For more information, watch the Apple Education event video (January, 2012).

Note to iOS users:

It’s easy to add ePubs to your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, either from your computer or directly on your iOS device.

1. From your computer:

1. Download the iBooks app from iTunes or the App Store.
2. Go to one of the sources for ePubs listed above and download the ebooks you want to your computer.
3. Drag your downloaded ebooks onto the library area of iTunes (shown right).
4. Sync your device with iTunes.

2. Directly on your iPad or iOS device:
Ebooks opened on a website, from Dropbox, or within an email will automatically be added to a “shelf” in your iBooks app. The iBooks app also includes access to the iBookstore. In the iBookstore, you may search for and download tens of thousands of free ePubs from Project Gutenberg directly to your iPad or iPhone. Additionally, ebooks may be linked to from course pages in iTunes U.

Note to Kindle users:

The Amazon Kindle does not support texts in the ePub format. Although a Kindle app is available for non-Kindle devices (such as the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone), Kindle devices and Kindle apps use a proprietary format and do not read ePubs. You can convert a text from ePub to the Kindle format using Calibre, although ePub enhancements will be lost in the process.

Instructions for converting ePubs to Kindle format.

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Brought to you by: OnlineUniversities.com

Thanks to the generous and meticulous work of sedimentary geochemist Robert D. Cody, a series of historic texts in geology are being made available as enhanced ePubs for your iPad, iPhone, Nook or other e-reading device.

New to ePub? Want instructions on where to find additional ePub texts or how to load them onto your iPad, iPhone, Nook or other e-reader device? See this general e-book overview page.

Listed in alphabetical order by author last name (right-click to download):

1. D.T. Ansted, Scenery, Science, and Art, being extracts from the Note-books of a Geologist and Mining Engineer (1854). (ePub 6/23/2011).
2. Robert Bakewell, An Introduction to Geology, 2nd ed. (London, 1815). (ePub 9/29/2010).
3. Robert Boyle, An Essay about the Origine & Virtues of Gems (London, 1672). (ePub 8/8/2013).
4. William Buckland, Reliquiae Diluvianae or, Observations on the Organic Remains Contained in Caves, Fissures, and Diluvial Gravel… (London, 1823). (ePub 08/01/2012).
5. Georges Cuvier, A Discouse on the Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe, trans. Robert Kerr (Edinburgh, 1831)
6. Charles Darwin, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (London, 1842). (ePub 11/10/2010).
7. Clarence Dutton, Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon (Washington, 1882). Plates (pdf). Atlas (pdf). (ePub 08/01/2012).
8. Edward Forbes, Travels through the Alps of Savoy (1845). (ePub 12/10/2010).
9. James Hall, Four Contributions in Support of Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1790, 1798, 1812, 1826). (ePub 10/3/2010).
10. Robert Hooke, Observations on Earthquakes (1705). (ePub 9/19/2011).
11. James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (Edinburgh, 1788). (ePub 9/29/2010).
12. Robert Jameson, System of Mineralogy, v3 [Elements of Geognosy] (Edinburgh, 1808). (ePub 7/10/2012).
13. John Kidd, A Geological Essay on the Imperfect Evidence in Support of a Theory of the Earth (Oxford, 1815). (ePub 7/10/2012).
14. Richard Kirwan
    • Richard Kirwan, Elements of Mineralogy (1784). (ePub 1/21/2011).
    • Richard Kirwan, Geological Essays (London, 1799). (ePub 1/19/2010).
15. Charles Lyell
    Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 9th ed. (London, 1853; originally published 1830-33). (ePub 9/29/2010).
    • Charles Lyell, Travels in North America (London, 1845), 2 vols. (ePub 3/23/2011).
16. William Maclure, Observations on the Geology of the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1817). (ePub 9/30/2010).
17. Hugh Miller, Old Red Sandstone (4th American edition, 1851). (ePub 4/4/2011).
18. John Mitchell, Two Papers on Earthquakes, with Conjectures Upon Earthquakes (1761). (ePub 1/19/2010).
19. John Murray, A Comparative View of the Huttonian and Neptunian Systems of Geology (Edinburgh, 1802). (ePub 9/29/2010).
20. William Nicol, Henry Sorby, and N. L. Bowen, Five Contributions to Petrography. (ePub 12/30/2010).
21. Rembrandt Peale, An Historical Disquisition on the Mammoth, or, Great American Incognitum (London, 1803). (ePub 8/8/2013).
22. John Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (Edinburgh, 1822 reprint of 1802). (ePub 9/29/2010).
23. George Poulett Scrope, Geology and Extinct Volcanos of Central France (London, 1858). (ePub 4/28/2011).
24. William Smith, Strata Identified by Organized Fossils (London, 1816). (ePub 9/30/2010).
25. Nicolaus Steno, Prodromus (1669). (ePub 12/12/2010).
26. Abraham Gotlob Werner, New Theory of the Formation of Veins (1791); trans. Charles Anderson (Edinburgh, 1809). (ePub 11/09/2010).
27. (ePubs file directory)

Coming soon: Cody is currently preparing ePub editions of Agricola’s De re metallica (1556) and Darwin’s study of fossil mammals from the Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle.

ePub enhancements
These ePub files are enhanced by Robert Cody. Cody provides a helpful introduction to each author and work. The books also include abundant maps and illustrations, many in color. In some cases, Cody inserts high quality images of plates and maps obtained from the OU History of Science Collections’ online galleries. Cody also embeds fonts to better approximate the small caps of the original papers (and occasionally to accommodate quotations in Greek). He creates hypertext hot links for tables of contents and footnotes. These changes make the books much more accessible and pleasing to use, especially for touch screen e-readers such as the iPad.

Please notify us of errors you encounter as you read these texts. Revised editions will be posted here as corrections are made.

Our heart-felt thanks to Robert Cody for this excellent work that will be of service to many.

Coordinators of the Crawford Project at the University of Edinburgh are Dr Monica Azzolini and Dr John Henry.

Project activities began in 2009. Lectures by Robert Westman, Owen Gingerich, Adam Mosley and John Brown are available on the Events section of the website. For more information, see the Crawford Project website.

Some astronomical images available in the image galleries of the History of Science Collections are listed here. The OU History of Science Collections’ copy of Copernicus (1543), for example, was annotated by another important circle of mid-16th century astronomers, led by Offusius in Paris. Whereas the Wittenberg circle throws light upon the initial Lutheran reception of Copernicus, the Offusius circle offers insight into the initial reception of Copernicus by Catholics. It is available here in its entirety, with extensive annotations.