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 (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 It publishes scans and transcriptions of (many hitherto unpublished) sources, data visualizations, and databases, all related to the premodern study of magnetism.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 e-leo experiment stems from the very particular nature of the Biblioteca Leonardina collection, which possesses the entire published corpus of Leonardo da Vinci’s works, starting with the first edition of the Treatise on Painting of 1651, and ranging from the oldest editions to the most recent facsimile publications, including those of the national edition of Leonardo’s manuscripts and drawings. The archive contains almost the entire corpus of Leonardo’s work, relying on its collection of editions (from the first, dated 1651), and has set itself an even more ambitious goal, that of contextualizing them within the broader framework of Italian and European historical and scientific heritage. The data in the archive are texts and drawings, analysed and classified by means of indexing methods for drawing searches, semantic glossaries, and search filter tools: an apparatus proposing an integrated processing model for Renaissance manuscripts by artist-engineers. In parallel, a scientific programme is being developed for the study of Leonardo’s specialized “languages” (mechanics, optics, anatomy, architecture, etc.), with the aim of giving access to the various 15th and 16th century manuscript production in the Vulgar Italian. A programme of translations into English of Leonardo’s corpus has also been started. Furthermore, e-Leo is currently experiencing a further, twofold stage of development: on the one hand, we are processing manuscripts contemporary with Leonardo (such as the Zibaldone by Bonaccorso Ghiberti), and on the other hand, his literary sources (not yet published).
E-leo meets the issue of the accessibility of the Leonardian corpus, published in a number of facsimile editions between the nineteenth and the twentieth century (mainly the first half): 1. a corpus comprising a massive number of sheets; 2. Fragmented in terms of collocation; 3. extremely complex by virtue of its intrinsic features (the relationship between text and image, which distinguishes it graphically; the fragmentariness of the drawings and projects, which are rarely finished; and the difficulty of reading the texts because they are themselves fragmentary, besides being in mirror writing). At this time it is the most complete digital edition of Leonardo’s corpus. It builds on that bulk of publications of manuscripts and drawings mentioned above, providing a powerful tool for accessing it and a resource for the study and analysis of Leonardo da Vinci’s works (but also for a broader and more generalized treatment, with similar criteria, of technical-scientific texts from the late medieval and Renaissance periods). It is indeed intended to provide further points of access to the content: the index of drawings, which tries to account for and include what gets left out in a textual search; and the glossary, which attempts to describe and historicize Leonardo’s language.
A production of the Making and Knowing Project, this edition provides a transcription and English translation of Ms. Fr. 640, composed by an anonymous “author-practitioner” in 1580s Toulouse and now held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. This manuscript offers unique firsthand insight into making and materials from a time when artists were scientists. The research resources in this edition explore the manuscript’s context and diverse topics.
The Workdiaries of Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle’s workdiaries, written between 1647 and 1691, are a vivid record of observation and experimentation by one of founding fathers of modern science. These modest-looking bundles of papers and stitched books, some stained with chemicals and covered with notes and comments, reveal the methods and procedures of Boyle’s scientific enquiries. They include records of recipes, measurements, apparatus and data collection, as well as notes from Boyle’s reading and conversations with travelers and artisans. From this site you can view images and transcripts of the workdiaries, search the workdiary texts, and access reference resources on places, people and books.
A database of 38,000+ links to freely accessible electronic texts and digitized photographic reproductions of Neo-Latin works, dating from late fifteenth century to present, organized by author/commentator and title. Searchable
