Tag: History of Science

ATMA – Ancient Texts of Military Art

https://ista.univ-fcomte.fr/omekatest/s/atma-english/page/welcome_ATMA

ATMA is a thematic digital library devoted to the technical works of the Western military tradition (tactics, military architecture, ballistics, etc.) from the 16th to the early 17th century. Its aim is to make these texts accessible and facilitate their consultation and study through a series of online digital tools:

  • 3D models
  • interactive maps
  • technical glossary
  • identification of intertextual references (in progress)
  • “text” version by OCR (in progress)

The project, launched in September 2022, is in its initial phase: ATMA currently has 75 digitised texts (3 of which have been OCR’ed and can be searched using lexical terms), 2 author biographies, 1 3D technical illustration, a geographical map and 1 technical glossary.

Magnetic Margins. A Census and Annotations Database

Magnetic Margins homepage
https://www.magnetic-margins.com/resource/Start

The project Magnetic Margins investigates how and by whom the most important early modern book publications on magnetism were read and annotated. This database provides a census of major publications in this field of study and maps annotations in the individual copies of these editions.

Rara Magnetica. A Repository of Historical Sources Related to the Premodern Research on Magnetism

Rara Magnetica Homepage
https://www.raramagnetica.de/

Rara Magnetica (1269-1599) is the name of Gustav Hellmann’s well known anthology published in 1898. With this collection, he sought to provide access to some of the earliest, yet rare publications in the field of geomagnetism that predated William Gilbert’s landmark publication De Magnete of 1600. The digital project and platform Rara Magnetica translates these efforts into the digital domain, going far beyond digital editions.

The need to publish important but understudied sources is most efficiently achieved by providing curated digital structured and linked data. Rara Magnetica hence – as an ongoing project – is both a repository and an interactive research platform. It publishes scans and transcriptions of (many hitherto unpublished) sources, data visualizations, and databases, all related to the premodern study of magnetism. Moreover, it provides various tools to investigate each of these resources independently and in combination. A major aim in fact is to enhance multimodal analyses that transcend media barriers by allowing to research imagery along with full texts, material sources along with their conceptual content. This is achieved by various but interlinked tools providing different ways of looking at the same sources.

The Making and Knowing Project

https://www.makingandknowing.org/

The Making and Knowing Project is a research and pedagogical initiative in the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University that explores the intersections between artistic making and scientific knowing. Today these realms are regarded as separate, yet in the earliest phases of the Scientific Revolution, nature was investigated primarily by skilled artisans by means of continuous and methodical experimentation in the making of objects – the time when “making” was “knowing.” Drawing on techniques from both laboratory and archival research, the Making and Knowing Project crosses the science/humanities divide and explores the relationships between today’s labs and the craft workshops of the past, and between pre-industrial conceptions of natural knowledge and our understanding of science and art today.

Leonardo da Vinci: Between Art and Science (NEH Summer Institute, Florence Italy 2012), edited by Francesca Fiorani and Anna Marazeula Kim (March 2014)

https://faculty.virginia.edu/Fiorani/NEH-Institute/essays/introduction/

This collection of essays emerged from the research projects that 24 NEH Scholars developed during the NEH Summer Institute “Leonardo da Vinci: Between Art and Science” (Florence, Italy, June–July 2012), hosted by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI). Over a period of three weeks, NEH Scholars explored the relations between art and science in the works of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), the versatile, canonical artist of western art who moved with equal ease among artistic, literary, intellectual and scientific circles. The Institute was organized around three major themes: Word and Image, Painting and Drawing, and Craftsmen and Scholars.

The Newton Project

The Newton Project is dedicated to publishing in full an online edition of all of Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) printed and unprinted writings, including his notebooks and correspondence. The edition presents a full (diplomatic) rendition featuring all the amendments Newton made to his own texts or a more readable (normalised) version. Also includes translations of his most important Latin religious texts.

Italian Academies Database

http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/ItalianAcademies/

The online interactive Database of Academies includes books published by Academies from 1525–1700 and people involved in Academies or in the publishing industry. It contains about 10,000 entries, in particular academicians, authors, contributors, dedicatees, printers, publishers, editors, illustrators, Academies’ emblems and lists of members, and lists of books published under their auspices. Each book is described through some 20 fields. Each person is searchable, as far as possible, according to dates, nationality, profession, gender, nickname in Academies, and their role in publications.