Saturday, February 27, 2010

The Isaac Newton Project

Currently over 3.9 million words are available in the Isaac Newton Project, hosted by the University of Sussex, in collaboration with institutions at Cambridge University. "Our aim is to make it possible, for the first time in history, to grasp the organic unity of Newton's writing by garnering all his astonishingly diverse productions into a single, freely accessible electronic edition."

The Project's vision is ambitious. Among the goals are:
•complete text-encoded transcripts, in both 'diplomatic' and 'normalized' versions - the former recording all the deletions, additions, errors and alterations made in the original document, the latter edited to yield something more like a 'finished' text;
•high-resolution facsimile images of all the papers, and of the marginal annotations made by Newton to the books in his library, most of which still survive.

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