Darwin Manuscripts Project

From digitalHPS

Visit the Darwin Manuscripts Project at [1].

The aim of this project is to produce professional quality scholarly editions of Darwin's manuscripts. We provide high-quality scanned images of Darwin's manuscripts and transcriptions indicating physical qualities of the text and instruments Darwin used to create it. The transcriptions also show the layering effect created by Darwin's revisions of his manuscripts---what he crossed out, wrote between lines, marginal notes, lettering and numbering intended to organize his manuscripts. A reader can reconstruct the history of a manuscript's creation by Darwin. The transcriptions are represented in a custom XML scheme. With this markup, text can be tagged to indicate the physical qualities of the manuscript and Darwin's writing, and by other content-oriented categories.

Dr. Goldstein has a page on his web site describing the Evolution Ontology project, a metadata scheme for organizing information about evolutionary biology. Check it out at [2]. This project is intended to connect with the Darwin Manuscripts Project by rendering Darwin's conceptual scheme ontologically, and by placing that scheme in the context of subsequent developments in evolutionary biology.

Dr. Goldstein also written an article in Evolution: Education and Outlook [3] about the editorial practices at the project. Visit at [4]. If the article isn't available online for free, email Dr. Goldstein for a digital reprint.

A digital edition of the first edition of The Origin of Species is under development. A draft copy is available at [5] (6.5 MB PDF file; please see appendices for information about the current state of development). This text is intended for general readers, scholarly readers, and data mining. Because it is represented in LaTeX code, it can be customized, for instance, for different reading devices.

Dr. David Kohn is the Editor-in-Chief of the DMP; Dr. Niles Eldredge, Scientific Consultant; and Dr. Adam M. Goldstein, Associate Editor.

Ontology development

1. Versioning
   1. Subversion
   2. svnX and TortoiseSVN
2. Bibliographic records management
   1. BibDesk
   2. BibTeX
3. Text editing and typesetting
   1. Emacs.app
   2. Jedit
   3. Smultron
   4. Command line tools: awk, sed
   5. LaTeX (TeXLive for OSX)
4. Ontology development
   1. Protege 3.x, 4.x
   2. dot (directed graphing)
   3. OmniGraffle Pro

Manuscript editions

1. Oxygen XML editing environment
2. MS Office
3. Custom database interface
4. Preview.app for viewing images
5. Custom XML schema describing Darwin's manuscripts

Notes.

BibDesk is a killer app for bibliography management. The BibTeX format is stable, extensible, well understood, and widely used. Many tools exist for importing and exporting data from other formats. BibDesk is packed with powerful tools for making changes to an entire database of thousands of records; searching and organizing references; and acquiring them from online sources as well as keyboarding.