J. Broadway
The letterbooks of the Royal Society provide a rich and varied archive
widely used by historians of science, but for which only edited selections
have appeared in print. The collection is an important source of material
not only about scientific thought and practice, but also for the wider
cultural and intellectual environment of the period. The ultimate aim of the
archival staff of the Royal Society and the Centre for Editing Lives and
Letters is to place the entire collection on-line in an accessible, enriched
form for the use of scholars and interested members of the public.
Our experience of working with other projects has shown the pitfalls of
simply encoding manuscripts in XML, without considering fully questions of
purpose and use. The diversity of material in this collection - including
letters, observations and minutes in various languages, along with diagrams,
tables and images received or sent by the Royal Society over many years -
presents particular challenges. These are deepened by the need to develop
the resource incrementally, imposed by funding constraints and the range of
expertise that must be harnessed. A pilot project is currently producing an
encoding scheme and support software to allow a complex site to be built and
updated automatically as content is added. The first version of the site
will be released in April 2005 and the content used will be analysed to form
the basis of a thesaurus, to enable conceptual searching of the corpus
through semantic web applications. This paper will report on the results of
the pilot project and initial content analysis.
|