Multidimensional Chronological Analysis of Manuscript Corpora Using Isaac Newton's Chymical Papers as a Test Platform

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary Scholars who work with manuscript materials encounter numerous difficulties beyond the obvious fact that handwriting can be difficult and ambiguous to read. The problem of dating the different stages of composition is often a significant issue, as in the case of early modern scientific and technological manuscripts, which were often separated or even dismembered and reassembled after the author?s death, as with the papers of Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, to name just a few. A solution to the problems posed by dating large manuscript corpora would therefore be of benefit to researchers in many areas scholarship, not to mention librarians and museum workers. The present proposal aims to use Isaac Newton?s very large manuscript Nachlass as a platform for exploring multiple techniques, including computational techniques and others, for dating manuscripts and for assessing them in combination with one another. In addition to providing important historical information that will enable scholars to come to grips with the chronological development of Newton?s chymical corpus, which is of substantial public interest as well as of scholarly interest, the tools and approaches that are to be used in this project will be transportable to all other projects that contain undated manuscript material in any field of inquiry, not just the history of science. A final impact of the proposal will be to further public awareness of Newton?s chymical research, an area that will help to stimulate interest in science in an audience that ranges from K-12 students up to professionals with widely diverse intellectual interests. Technical Summary The techniques that are to be used in this project include comparison of parallel passages generated automatically by a barrage of computational techniques (e.g. Latent Semantic Analysis and Topic Modeling), spectro-metric analysis of inks and papers by Raman spectroscopy, comparison of watermarks by means of the latest imaging technologies, tracking of developments in orthography and handwriting, and the systematic study of citations, facilitated by the production of an authoritative electronic bibliography with hyperlinks to the citations in texts. In addition to applying these multiple techniques, the project will follow an integrative approach to assessing the data generated by them. In order to achieve this result, the project will use network graph analysis to produce visual clusters of manuscripts and passages whose respective chronological markers correlate with one another. Correlations generated by independent test-runs employing different techniques (e.g. ink-analysis and watermark-analysis) will then be compared to one another, using image graphs. In cases where a clean overlay of graphs does not result, team members will revisit the data and determine the cause of the poor ?fit.? Metrical techniques will also be developed for determining the degree of agreement that constitutes good versus poor fit. The result will be a model for determining relative chronology of the parts within large textual corpora that will be transportable to other projects.