Science in the Making — introduction
This article was originally published on April 24, 2017
Digirati are working with The Royal Society to produce a pilot for The Royal Society Journal Collection: Science in the Making, a new platform for archival items related to 350 years of published material in the Philosophical Transactions, the oldest continuously published science journal in the world. This new archive will include manuscripts, marginalia, illustrations, and correspondence that so far have only been available to people visiting the Society. The platform has a wide potential audience, from academics to schoolchildren investigating the emergence of modern science through the source material in the Society’s archives.
This article series will report on our progress as we work together to build the pilot platform. We’ll be combining two open standards — IIIF and Web Annotations — to present the archive material and enable contribution by archivists and the public alike. We’ll be surfacing the content in the Omeka S platform, and using some of the components of the DLCS to provide a standards-based back end for annotation, search, image and text services. This combination of technologies allows for rapid progress and flexibility as we research, experiment, develop and test the evolving platform.
The Royal Society have already identified many case studies and types of user story; for the pilot we will be concentrating on three case studies that will best test the evolving platform:
- A scientific history of colours, from Newton to Maxwell [1664–1860].
- Thomas Henry Huxley: author, communicator, referee, editor and secretary.
- The Scientific Advantages of Antarctic Expedition [1887–1913]
The published posts are:
