Crowdsourced Transcriptions of Humphry Davy's Notebooks

The Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI) holds an unparalleled collection of Sir Humphry Davy's notebooks. One of the most famous chemists of the nineteenth century, Davy used these notebooks to record his experiments and to write poetry. There is much evidence from the previous AHRC project on Davy's letters that the public is interested in Davy, in his unpublished manuscripts, and, particularly, in his poetry and its relation to his science. Davy's notebooks have yet to be transcribed and they are only available to readers who visit the RI archive in person. This project will crowdsource transcriptions of five of Davy's notebooks from the Zooniverse (https://www.zooniverse.org/) community of 1.7 million registered volunteers. High-quality images of the manuscripts will be produced and made available on a freely accessible website accompanied with the transcriptions. This current project will ask the Zooniverse participants to reflect upon how poetry helped construct scientific knowledge using the example of Davy, and to think about how the arts and sciences might work together today. Digitising the notebooks makes them available to a much larger audience and creates a resource for future research. It also means that the manuscripts themselves, which are very fragile, can be carefully preserved by the RI while promoting their historical holdings to the world. The Zooniverse participants will learn new skills with an innovative new project builder created to render Davy's notebook page on screen. Previous surveys of the Zooniverse community have found that, overwhelmingly, people engage in transcription projects because they enjoy contributing to a scholarly endeavour. Related activities pursued during the previous grant demonstrated how transcription can be both personally satisfying and confidence-building. Learning about Davy caused people to change their minds about the idea of science and the arts as 'two cultures'.