The Archimedes Project: Realizing the Vision of an Open Digital Research Library for the History of Mechanics

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The Archimedes Project will create a testbed for developing and exploring model interactive environments for the history of mechanics. It will also serve as a proof-of-concept project for open digital libraries for topics in the history of science designed to integrate research and knowledge dissemination in new ways. The project is a join endeavor of the Classics Department at Harvard University, the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, Germany, the English Department at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and the Perseus Project at Tufts University. It also engages wider network of scholars supported in particular by Project International de Cooperation Scientifique (PICS). Numerous treatises on mechanics as well as other forms of documentation of mechanical knowledge and practices constitute the corpus of the testbed. Ongoing research at the MPIWG on the long-term development of mental models of mechanical thinking and their manifestation in technical terminologies, inferences of practitioners, engineers, and scientists plays an important role in the testbed design. The testbed also requires a powerful, linguistically based information technology for handling the variety of languages occurring in the source materials. Source documents must be prepared with tools such as automatic morphological analysis of Latin, Greek and Italian, and semantic linking of sources to general and technical, historical and modern dictionaries and reference works.