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References
See Isaac Newton, Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (London, 1728); Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John. In Two Parts (London, 1733); and Newton, Two Letters of Sir Isaac Newton to Mr Le Clerc, late Divinity Professor of the Remonstrants in Holland. The Former containing a Dissertation upon the Reading of the Greek Text, 1 John v. 7; the Latter upon that of 1 Timothy iii, 16. Published from authentic MSS. in the Library of the Remonstrants in Holland (London, 1754.) For responses to the General Scholium to the second edition of the Principia Mathematica of 1713, see Larry Stewart, “’seeing Through the Scholium’, Religion and Reading Newton in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 34 (1996), pp. 123-65; more generally see Rob. Iliffe, “‘A connected system’: The snare of a beautiful hand and the unity of Newton’s archive,” in M. Hunter ed., Archives of the Scientific Revolution (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1998), pp. 137-57. I would like to thank Dolores Iorizzo and John Young for comments on previous versions of this paper.
Dreyer’s remarks are published in his “Presidential Address” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society lxxxiv, no. 4 (Feb. 1924), pp. 298–303; see, p. 300. Sampson’s remarks are also published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in the March 24, 1924, issue, pp. 378-83; see pp. 381-2.
The more substantial editorial projects have been: H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall, and L. Tilling, eds., The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 7 vols (Cambridge: Published for the Royal Society at the University Press, 1959-77); D. T. Whiteside, ed., The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, 8 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967-81); A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall, eds, Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962); J. Herivel, The Background to Newton’s ‘Principia’. A Study of Newton’s Dynamical Researches in the Years 1664-84 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); A. E. Shapiro, ed., The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton, 3 vols continuing, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984-); and J. E. McGuire and M. Tamny, eds, ‘Certain Philosophical Questions’: Newton’s Trinity Notebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.)
See H. J. MacLachlan, ed., Sir Isaac Newton Theological Manuscripts, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1950); J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan’,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 21 (1966), pp. 108-43; D. C. Kubrin, “Newton and the Cyclical Cosmos, Providence and the Mechanical Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967), pp. 325-46; F. E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); B. J. T. Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, or, ‘The Hunting of the Greene Lyon’ (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975); K. Figala, “Newton as Alchemist,” History of Science 15 (1977), pp. 102–37; R. S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); D. Castillejo, The Expanding Force in Newton’s Cosmos as Shown in Unpublished Papers (Madrid: Ediciones de Arte y Bibliofilia, 1981) and B. J. T. Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
See, amongst others, J. E. Force and R. Popkin, eds., Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990); Scott Mandelbrote, “ ‘A Duty of the Greatest Moment’: Isaac Newton and the Writing of Biblical Criticism,” British Journal for the History of Science 26 (1993), pp. 281–302; and Rob Iliffe, “ ‘Making a shew’: Apocalyptic Hermeneutics and Christian Idolatry in the Work of Isaac Newton and Henry More,” in J. E. Force and R. H. Popkin, eds, The Books of Nature and Scripture: Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Biblical Criticism in the Netherlands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 55–98.
Current best practice for electronic editions are recommended by organisations such as the Model Editions Partnership (MEP); see for example the MEP “Prospectus for Electronic Historical Editions” 〈http://adh.sc.edu/mepinfo/MEP-Docs/proptoc.htm〉 (accessed 19 Novemer 2001) and Susan Hockey and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, “Markup Guidelines for Documentary Editions,” (4 July 1999), 〈http://adh.sc.edu/MepGuide.html〉 (accessed 19 January 2001).
The catalogue is presently housed at 〈http://www.newtonproject.ic.ac.uk/catalogue/newton.htm〉 The EAD work was undertaken by the AUSTEHC group at the University of Melbourne.
For a good introduction to many of the issues involved in online publishing, see S. Hockey, Electronic Texts in the Humanities: Principles and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. chaps. 3 and 8.
See Martha Nell Smith, Ellen Louise Hart, and Marta Werner, “Detailed Description of the Archive”, 〈http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinsonarchive_description.html〉 (accessed 11 March 2002) and Martha Nell Smith, “Because the Plunge from the Front Overturned Us: The Dickinson Electronic Archives Project” 〈http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/plunge1.html〉 (accessed on 26 March 2001; published in print in Studies in the Literary Imagination 32 (1999)); and Martha Nell Smith, “Corporealizations of Dickinson and Interpretive Machines,” in G. Bornstein and T. Tinkle, eds., The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print and Digital Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 195–221—available in print facsimile at 〈http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dickinson/resources/smith corp/corp1.html〉 (accessed at 11 March 2002). There is of course an irony inherent in a situation where text intendended for a handful of select readers is exposed to the gaze of countless end users.
The Newton Project is a member of the TEI Consortium and is also committed to the aims of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). This promotes the free exchange of non-proprietary software that will facilitate the creation of architecturally compatible (i.e., relevantly similar software and metadata) resources; see the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol at 〈http://www.openarchives.org〉 and Clifford Lynch, “Metadata Harvesting and the Open Archives Initiative,” A.R.L. Bimonthly Report 217 (August 2001) 〈http://www.ar1.org/newsltr/217/mhp.html〉 (accessed 19 June 2002).
Even if it is true that certain aspects of reading are necessarily linear, in the sense of requiring sequential prose that conveys the logical structure of an argument or narrative, the online medium facilitates the retrieval of information far better than does the printed book. For general thoughts about the hypertext medium, see George Landow, Hypertext: The convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Jerome McGann, “The Rationale of Hypertext” (1994) 〈http://jefferson.village.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html〉 (accessed 1 September 2000); P. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); A. Renear, “Out of Praxis: Three (Meta) Theories of Textuality,” in Kathryn Sutherland, ed., Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp.107–26; D. C. Greetham, Theories of Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
For issues connected to the nature of edited texts and authorial intention see inter alia Thomas Tanselle, “Textual Instability and Editorial Idealism,” Studies in Bibliography 49 (1996), pp. 1–60 which is available at 〈http://etext.virginia.edu/〉 (accessed 12 March 2002); for more on intention, see Tanselle, “The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention,” Studies in Bibliography 29 (1976), pp. 167–211.
At the time of writing, digital library collections form the central and lavishly funded grand vision of nearly all humanities computing projects in the U.S. and the E.U. Foremost amongst these is probably the U.S. Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI; see 〈http://www.dli2.nsf.gov〉 which contains lower level digital libraries such as the National (SMET) Digital Library (NSDL) and is sponsored by agencies such as the NEH, NSF, NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Library of Congress. More specifically, the Perseus Project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu) has pioneered efforts to create a large scale digital library of classical Greek and more recently Roman writings; see G. Crane, “Extending a Digital Library: Beginning a Roman Perseus,” New England Classical Journal 27 (2000), pp. 140–60. SMET stands for Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (Education); one should apologise at this juncture for the proliferation of acronyms that often sound like criminal organisations from a James Bond film.
See for example, Clifford Lynch, “Digital Collections, Digital Libraries and the Digitization of Cultural Heritage Information,” First Monday 7 (May, 2002) 〈http://firstmonday.org/issue/issue 7_5/lynch/index.html〉 (accessed 17 May 2002).
For thoughts about the edition/archive difference, see John Lavagnino, “Reading, Scholarship and Hypertext Editions,” Text 8 (1996), pp. 109–24; Jerome McGann, “The Rossetti Archive and Image-based Electronic Editing,” in R. J. Finneran, ed., The Literary Text in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 145–83; and McGann, “The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive,” Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), University of Virginia, 〈http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/rossetti/rossetti.html〉 (accessed 8 June 1999.)
There are also discussions about which texts should go online first and what sort of ‘release schedule’ is appropriate for the future. Copyright issues—such as the definition and scope of ‘fair use’ and ‘fair dealing,’ whether academics should hand over copyright to publishers, or the extent to which any academic ‘work’ is owned by an academic’s institution—are highly relevant to the status of the materials in online projects. For cogent discussions of these issues in the wake of the U. S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, see, amongst others, Henry Gladney, “Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property,” D-Lib Magazine (December, 1999) 〈http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12gladney.html〉 (accessed 5 July 2002); Scott Bennett, “Authors’ Rights,” Journal of Electronic Publishing 5, no. 2 (December, 1999) 〈http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/05-02/bennett.html〉 (accessed 5 July 2002); John Willinsky, “Copyright Contradictions in Scholarly Publishing,” First Monday 7, no. 11 (November, 2002) 〈http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_11/willinsky/index.html〉 (accessed 2 January 2003); and, in particular, Ann Okerson, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: Academic Publishing, Copyright and Other Miasmas,” a chapter in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences publication, “Transition to Paper,” 〈http://www.amacad.org/publications/trans11.htm〉 (accessed 20 May 2002).
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Iliffe, R. (2004). Digitizing Isaac: The Newton Project and an Electronic Edition of Newton’s Papers. In: Force, J.E., Hutton, S. (eds) Newton and Newtonianism. International Archives of the History of Ideas/Archives internationales d’histoire des idées, vol 188. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2238-7_3
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