Isaac Newton’s Personal Notebooks Go Digital

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/isaac-newton-papers/

by wicknicks • 15 years ago

116 31 15 years ago

asolove• 15 years ago

I am very glad to see the images available, and am sure that a lot of very good work was put into the scanning and transcription, much less the political fight that eventually allowed the rights to the expensive scans to be made public.

That said, it is a bit sad to see yet another manuscript viewing UI in yet another siloed archive. More specifically:

- There is no way to link to an individual page, so while the manuscript is "online" it is not addressable as part of the linked web. Scholars who write about the manuscript will be unable to link to a specific item or to share linked-data with one another.

- How long will these URLs be valid? "http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04004/ seems like the sort of thing that might get changed at the next departmental reorganization or database change.

- When viewing the manuscript, the hidden "contents" tab is far more valuable than the open "introduction" tab, and by default each manuscript is opened to page 0, which usually requires about ten manual page turns before landing at even the title page.

Some things that would be very nice to see in this field:

- An accepted metadata format or REST protocol for manuscripts, so that we could use a viewer of choice

- An inventive scholar to write digital scholarship that comments on these manuscripts using the full power of hypertext to link pages together, trace themes or ideas through different parts of the text, compare proof or notation methods between different texts in the corpus.

w1ntermute3• 15 years ago

Is this under copyright? If not, then someone should just download the whole thing and reupload it in a more accessible format.

theFco• 15 years ago

this is very interesting but I have a question, while the originals can't be under copyright, do the scans have a different copyright as kind of a derived work?

alanfalcon• 15 years ago

The Cambridge University Library claims copyright on the images, however they do offer this license:

"Images made available for download are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0)"

So there's no reason why someone couldn't do exactly what you suggest. (Unfortunately, the images you can download seem to be much lower resolution than the ones they're hosting.)

godarderik• 15 years ago

> There is no way to link to an individual page, so while the manuscript is "online" it is not addressable as part of the linked web. Scholars who write about the manuscript will be unable to link to a specific item or to share linked-data with one another.

You can add a /n to the end of the URL, where n is the page you want it to point to.

akg• 15 years ago

Newton has been an inspiration. There was a famous quote by him that always stuck by me: "If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results."

gruseom7• 15 years ago

I highly doubt Newton said that. That's a modern, post-romantic way of thinking. Moreover, it would have been hugely impolite in the 17th century.

_delirium2• 15 years ago

As far as I can tell, ~100% of the (many) references to that quote can be traced to Richard Hamming's 1986 lecture, "You And Your Research" (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html), which includes that quote and attributes it to Newton (but without a specific citation). I'd be curious where Hamming got it from, since I'm not able to find either that exact quote or anything similar quoted by anybody pre-1986 (even as an apocryphal/uncited quote), at least from some brief Google Books and Lexis-Nexis digging.

ajax773• 15 years ago

You highly doubt a revolutionary figure said a radical thing because it would have been considered impolite/revolutionary/radical?

Newton was in a world of his own; he, along with a few select others (Lock, Descartes and others), are in large part responsible for the Enlightenment. The very Enlightenment this statement characterizes so well. Even if he didn't say it (I cannot find the source, but I have read this quote a number of times in various papers), it is very much the kind of statement he would make.

beefman• 15 years ago

direct link: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton

epynonymous• 15 years ago

pretty cool! 20 bucks says that someone makes an ipad app of this.

abailin• 15 years ago

That would be a great app - but there would be hundreds of MBs of images for one of his books. Not sure if there's a size limit in the app store.

snotrockets• 15 years ago

Israel's National Library holds another collection of Newton, composed of his notes on matters non scientific: mostly alchemy and theology.

Scans of which were recently made available online at http://dlib.nli.org.il/R/?func=collections&collection_id.... 6 (but it seems as if there's some problem with the website ATM.)

Isaac Newton’s Personal Notebooks Go Digital

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