6 ms·

Isaac Newton’s Personal Notebooks Go Digital

116 points by wicknicks 15y ago

asolove 15y ago
I am very glad to see the images available, and am sure that a lot of very good work was put into the scanning and transcription, much less the political fight that eventually allowed the rights to the expensive scans to be made public. That said, it is a bit sad to see yet another manuscript viewing UI in yet another siloed archive. More specifically: - There is no way to link to an individual page, so while the manuscript is "online" it is not addressable as part of the linked web. Scholars who write about the manuscript will be unable to link to a specific item or to share linked-data with one another. - How long will these URLs be valid? "http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04004/ http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04004/ seems like the sort of thing that might get changed at the next departmental reorganization or database change. - When viewing the manuscript, the hidden "contents" tab is far more valuable than the open "introduction" tab, and by default each manuscript is opened to page 0, which usually requires about ten manual page turns before landing at even the title page. Some things that would be very nice to see in this field: - An accepted metadata format or REST protocol for manuscripts, so that we could use a viewer of choice - An inventive scholar to write digital scholarship that comments on these manuscripts using the full power of hypertext to link pages together, trace themes or ideas through different parts of the text, compare proof or notation methods between different texts in the corpus.
- w1ntermute 15y ago
  Is this under copyright? If not, then someone should just download the whole thing and reupload it in a more accessible format.
  - theFco 15y ago
    this is very interesting but I have a question, while the originals can't be under copyright, do the scans have a different copyright as kind of a derived work?
    - w1ntermute 15y ago
      I thought that derivative copyrights only applied to work that required intellectual effort, such as a translation (for a book) or reinterpretation (for a song). The physical act of scanning doesn't seem like it should count.
      - westbywest 15y ago
        Scanning ancient documents can be anything but trivial, and frequently more involved than simply placing paper/ parchment/ vellum/ etc on a glass plate. They usually need to be handled very carefully with mesh gloves, not compressed or folded , and likely not exposed to overly bright light to avoid fading the ink. The USA founding documents, which are over 100 years newer by comparison, are encased in inert gas and hidden from bright lights for preservation. Newton's written notes may have required even greater care, which one could possibly argue would constitute unique intellectual effort.
        pbhjpbhj 15y ago
        Copyright does not protect "unique intellectual effort"; or at least that is not what it's for primarily. It protects the particular presentation of a creative work. IMO copyright should not be granted on 'mechanical' reproductions no matter how much sweat is produced on how many brows. Would Cambridge Uni really not digitise it's manuscript collection if they could not directly commercialise it? Maybe a new 'right' is required?
        ppereira 15y ago
        You don't copyright from storing someone's work. Scanning is a point-and-click affair, as I discovered while copying pages from some early Aldine editions last summer.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      Probably not, unless significant non-mechanical enhancement was performed, in which case maybe, and maybe differs between UK law and law elsewhere (and if you aren't yourself in the UK, how your local law interacts with the law in the country of the work's origin is another source of uncertainty). Here's the guidelines page Wikimedia Commons uses: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_PD-scan_tag http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_PD...
  - alanfalcon 15y ago
    The Cambridge University Library claims copyright on the images, however they do offer this license: "Images made available for download are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0)" So there's no reason why someone couldn't do exactly what you suggest. (Unfortunately, the images you can download seem to be much lower resolution than the ones they're hosting.)
    - w1ntermute 15y ago
      > Unfortunately, the images you can download seem to be much lower resolution than the ones they're hosting. I don't see why you couldn't exploit the analog loophole and just screenshot the "viewable" pages.
    - nl 15y ago
      The images you download are 1400x2000px, which seems reasonable. The zoom feature gives you access to image tiles. From a quick look, these are 258x258px images, named http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-ADD-04004-002-0000<page_number-2>_files/13/<column>_<row>.jpg http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-ADD-04004-002-00... Or something like that anyway. It also uses something called Microsoft DeepZoom (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-ADD-04004-001-00002.dzi http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-ADD-04004-001-00...), and is powered by a Json manifest (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/json/MS-ADD-04004.json?_dc=1323748616915&page=4&start=3&limit=1 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/json/MS-ADD-04004.json?_dc=1323748...) Enjoy.
- godarderik 15y ago
  > There is no way to link to an individual page, so while the manuscript is "online" it is not addressable as part of the linked web. Scholars who write about the manuscript will be unable to link to a specific item or to share linked-data with one another. You can add a /n to the end of the URL, where n is the page you want it to point to.
akg 15y ago
Newton has been an inspiration. There was a famous quote by him that always stuck by me: "If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results."
- gruseom 15y ago
  I highly doubt Newton said that. That's a modern, post-romantic way of thinking. Moreover, it would have been hugely impolite in the 17th century.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    As far as I can tell, ~100% of the (many) references to that quote can be traced to Richard Hamming's 1986 lecture, "You And Your Research" (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html), which includes that quote and attributes it to Newton (but without a specific citation). I'd be curious where Hamming got it from, since I'm not able to find either that exact quote or anything similar quoted by anybody pre-1986 (even as an apocryphal/uncited quote), at least from some brief Google Books and Lexis-Nexis digging.
    - gruseom 15y ago
      Good digging. Hamming doesn't seem the kind of guy who would just make that up. Perhaps it's a paraphrase of something Newton did say.
  - ajax77 15y ago
    You highly doubt a revolutionary figure said a radical thing because it would have been considered impolite/revolutionary/radical? Newton was in a world of his own; he, along with a few select others (Lock, Descartes and others), are in large part responsible for the Enlightenment. The very Enlightenment this statement characterizes so well. Even if he didn't say it (I cannot find the source, but I have read this quote a number of times in various papers), it is very much the kind of statement he would make.
beefman 15y ago
direct link: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton
epynonymous 15y ago
pretty cool! 20 bucks says that someone makes an ipad app of this.
- abailin 15y ago
  That would be a great app - but there would be hundreds of MBs of images for one of his books. Not sure if there's a size limit in the app store.
snotrockets 15y ago
Israel's National Library holds another collection of Newton, composed of his notes on matters non scientific: mostly alchemy and theology. Scans of which were recently made available online at http://dlib.nli.org.il/R/?func=collections&collection_id=785 http://dlib.nli.org.il/R/?func=collections&collection_id.... 6 (but it seems as if there's some problem with the website ATM.)

116 points by wicknicks 15y ago

I am very glad to see the images available, and am sure that a lot of very good work was put into the scanning and transcription, much less the political fight that eventually allowed the rights to the expensive scans to be made public. That said, it is a bit sad to see yet another manuscript viewing UI in yet another siloed archive. More specifically: - There is no way to link to an individual page, so while the manuscript is "online" it is not addressable as part of the linked web. Scholars who write about the manuscript will be unable to link to a specific item or to share linked-data with one another. - How long will these URLs be valid? "http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04004/ http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04004/ seems like the sort of thing that might get changed at the next departmental reorganization or database change. - When viewing the manuscript, the hidden "contents" tab is far more valuable than the open "introduction" tab, and by default each manuscript is opened to page 0, which usually requires about ten manual page turns before landing at even the title page. Some things that would be very nice to see in this field: - An accepted metadata format or REST protocol for manuscripts, so that we could use a viewer of choice - An inventive scholar to write digital scholarship that comments on these manuscripts using the full power of hypertext to link pages together, trace themes or ideas through different parts of the text, compare proof or notation methods between different texts in the corpus.

w1ntermute 15y ago
Is this under copyright? If not, then someone should just download the whole thing and reupload it in a more accessible format.
- theFco 15y ago
  this is very interesting but I have a question, while the originals can't be under copyright, do the scans have a different copyright as kind of a derived work?
  - w1ntermute 15y ago
    I thought that derivative copyrights only applied to work that required intellectual effort, such as a translation (for a book) or reinterpretation (for a song). The physical act of scanning doesn't seem like it should count.
    - westbywest 15y ago
      Scanning ancient documents can be anything but trivial, and frequently more involved than simply placing paper/ parchment/ vellum/ etc on a glass plate. They usually need to be handled very carefully with mesh gloves, not compressed or folded , and likely not exposed to overly bright light to avoid fading the ink. The USA founding documents, which are over 100 years newer by comparison, are encased in inert gas and hidden from bright lights for preservation. Newton's written notes may have required even greater care, which one could possibly argue would constitute unique intellectual effort.
      - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
        Copyright does not protect "unique intellectual effort"; or at least that is not what it's for primarily. It protects the particular presentation of a creative work. IMO copyright should not be granted on 'mechanical' reproductions no matter how much sweat is produced on how many brows. Would Cambridge Uni really not digitise it's manuscript collection if they could not directly commercialise it? Maybe a new 'right' is required?
      - ppereira 15y ago
        You don't copyright from storing someone's work. Scanning is a point-and-click affair, as I discovered while copying pages from some early Aldine editions last summer.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Probably not, unless significant non-mechanical enhancement was performed, in which case maybe, and maybe differs between UK law and law elsewhere (and if you aren't yourself in the UK, how your local law interacts with the law in the country of the work's origin is another source of uncertainty). Here's the guidelines page Wikimedia Commons uses: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_PD-scan_tag http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_PD...
- alanfalcon 15y ago
  The Cambridge University Library claims copyright on the images, however they do offer this license: "Images made available for download are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0)" So there's no reason why someone couldn't do exactly what you suggest. (Unfortunately, the images you can download seem to be much lower resolution than the ones they're hosting.)
  - w1ntermute 15y ago
    > Unfortunately, the images you can download seem to be much lower resolution than the ones they're hosting. I don't see why you couldn't exploit the analog loophole and just screenshot the "viewable" pages.
  - nl 15y ago
    The images you download are 1400x2000px, which seems reasonable. The zoom feature gives you access to image tiles. From a quick look, these are 258x258px images, named http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-ADD-04004-002-0000<page_number-2>_files/13/<column>_<row>.jpg http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-ADD-04004-002-00... Or something like that anyway. It also uses something called Microsoft DeepZoom (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-ADD-04004-001-00002.dzi http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-ADD-04004-001-00...), and is powered by a Json manifest (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/json/MS-ADD-04004.json?_dc=1323748616915&page=4&start=3&limit=1 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/json/MS-ADD-04004.json?_dc=1323748...) Enjoy.
godarderik 15y ago
> There is no way to link to an individual page, so while the manuscript is "online" it is not addressable as part of the linked web. Scholars who write about the manuscript will be unable to link to a specific item or to share linked-data with one another. You can add a /n to the end of the URL, where n is the page you want it to point to.

akg 15y ago

Newton has been an inspiration. There was a famous quote by him that always stuck by me: "If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results."

gruseom 15y ago
I highly doubt Newton said that. That's a modern, post-romantic way of thinking. Moreover, it would have been hugely impolite in the 17th century.
- _delirium 15y ago
  As far as I can tell, ~100% of the (many) references to that quote can be traced to Richard Hamming's 1986 lecture, "You And Your Research" (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html), which includes that quote and attributes it to Newton (but without a specific citation). I'd be curious where Hamming got it from, since I'm not able to find either that exact quote or anything similar quoted by anybody pre-1986 (even as an apocryphal/uncited quote), at least from some brief Google Books and Lexis-Nexis digging.
  - gruseom 15y ago
    Good digging. Hamming doesn't seem the kind of guy who would just make that up. Perhaps it's a paraphrase of something Newton did say.
- ajax77 15y ago
  You highly doubt a revolutionary figure said a radical thing because it would have been considered impolite/revolutionary/radical? Newton was in a world of his own; he, along with a few select others (Lock, Descartes and others), are in large part responsible for the Enlightenment. The very Enlightenment this statement characterizes so well. Even if he didn't say it (I cannot find the source, but I have read this quote a number of times in various papers), it is very much the kind of statement he would make.

beefman 15y ago

direct link: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton

epynonymous 15y ago

pretty cool! 20 bucks says that someone makes an ipad app of this.

abailin 15y ago
That would be a great app - but there would be hundreds of MBs of images for one of his books. Not sure if there's a size limit in the app store.

snotrockets 15y ago

Israel's National Library holds another collection of Newton, composed of his notes on matters non scientific: mostly alchemy and theology. Scans of which were recently made available online at http://dlib.nli.org.il/R/?func=collections&collection_id=785 http://dlib.nli.org.il/R/?func=collections&collection_id.... 6 (but it seems as if there's some problem with the website ATM.)