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The Harriot online Project

The Harriot online Project

Project info

The work of the English mathematician and philosopher Thomas Harriot (1560-1621) is amazingly broad, ranging from the concern with linguistic and ethnological questions to the theory of algebraic equations. In particular, topics of practical mathematics and natural philosophy that concerned also Galileo, such as fortification, shipbuilding, astronomy, optics, and mechanics, play a central role in Harriot's work. However, unlike his famous Italian contemporary, Harriot did not publish any of his scientific results, the only exception being a small report on his voyage to the New World that he undertook as versatile expert in the service of his first patron, Sir Walter Ralegh. Harriot's work therefore has to be reconstructed from his manuscripts. This fact has considerably hampered Harriot's reception, not only by his contemporaries, but also in the history of science.

Here, for the first time, a large selection from Harriot's manuscripts is made openly accessible through an electronic presentation: Harriot's notes on motion. Harriot left about 8,000 folio pages mainly containing his working notes and only few pages prepared for presentation (Add MSS 6782 - 6789 in the British Library and HMC 240, 241 in Petworth House, Sussex). The selection presented here contains about 350 folio pages preserved in the British Library. The folios have been chosen in a survey of the total of 8,000 pages by rough analysis of their contents in the attempt to produce a collection as complete as possible.

The notes document Harriot's work on the problem of motion in which he is primarily concerned with projectile motion and the motion of fall. The manuscripts are, however, highly unordered. Based on the results of scholarly work, the electronic presentation will in the near future be increasingly complemented with navigational tools that shall make the manuscripts more accessible.

Resources in ECHO

Online versions

Subversion repository

As of September 2012, the project's files are also part of the MPIWG-MPDL Content Project's repository (link). This will make updating the repository or local copies much easier. The respective branch can be checked out by directing a Subversion client to https://it-dev.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/svn/mpdl-project-content/trunk/texts/Harriot. The structure of the repository remains the same:

Maps contains schematic maps of how the folios might be structured thematically
Transcripts contains transcriptions in XML files
Documents contains miscellaneous documents, e. g. typing conventions

Versioned File Folders (deprecated as of September 2012)

At the MPIWG, versioned file folders are used to store maps and transcriptions. Users can download the current version or any older version of a document. If they decide to work on a document, it is recommended to download and lock the respective file so that no other user can work on it in the meantime.

Maps contains schematic maps of how the folios might be structured thematically
Transcripts contains transcriptions in XML files
Documents contains miscellaneous documents, e. g. typing conventions

Maps

The maps are edited with the free (but not open source) editor yEd. The symbols for the maps are stored in palette (attached to this page), which makes sure that the right symbols are used.

Purpose of the maps

The present order of the pages in the folios is not correct. The maps serve as a secondary way to group the pages according to topics and to virtually connect pages that belong to the same subject.

Export to interactive maps

There is also an experimental representation of the maps as an RDF graph (Enter here). As of now, it is only accessible inside the institute.

The visualization is made with a tool called LodLive), and it can also be queried by going to the query page. Instructions how to use the tool are attached to this page.

A thorough documentation will soon be available on Drupal, you can see the source code for the conversion script as well as check it out from the Mercurial repository with the command

hg clone https://it-dev.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/hg/graphML2RDF

Export to static maps

The maps can be exported to html and a webpage exists that displays all the maps and can be browsed.

Export from yEd has to be done manually for each map (there is no mass exporter), but the settings remain stable per session. The required steps are:

Set the export directory (remains stable per session)

Export as HTML-Imagemap with the following settings

Clipping: Default (leave settings as they are)
Image: Choose PNG and Antialiasing

HTML: uncheck both boxes (open link in new window, export description as tooltip) and replace the existing template with the following code (adapted to ECHO's Zope environment):

          <html metal:use-macro="here/main_template/macros/page">
          <head><title>INSERT_TITLE_HERE</title>
          <style type="text/css">
          .tooltip {
            font-size:10pt;
            background-color:#FFFFCC;
            border:1px solid black;
            padding:2px
          }
          </style>
          </head>
          <body>
          <span metal:fill-slot="body">
          ${DIAGRAM}
          </span>
          </body>
          </html>

Tiling: Do not activate Tiling

To export all the maps, it is best to open all the files, start to export the first one (thereby setting above settings) and close that one. After that the following key sequence can be used: Cmd-E, Return, Return, Cmd-W. This will export and close each map.
The resulting html files have to be edited, because a link to another map (i. e. another graphml file) will retain the extension graphml in the source code. A python script (attached to this page) takes care of this replacement and renames the files to the extension *.pt.
The pt-files have to be copied to tuxserve03:18021/echo_nav/echo_pages/content/scientific_revolution/harriot/maps

Transcriptions

Transcriptions are made directly in XML according to the ECHO schema (Documentation (mostly German)). A beginner's guide will be online here soon. We also recommend the use of text editors that offer autocompletion in connection with the Schema which facilitates the editing. Attached is an XSD version of the schema which can be used while editing texts in Eclipse. To make it work properly, the following line has to be added to the echo-Tag at the top of the document:

xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/ns/echo/1.0/ harriot_xsd/echo.xsd "

As for formulas, it possible to use LaTeX markup. There is a script that converts that code into MathML (link).

Macros

For Eclipse, a template has been created to quickly insert Commentaries and Translations. As this will later be fed into the annotation system, date and username are also inserted. Unfortunately, the date format is dependant on your machine's language settings.

For Emacs, a set of macros has been created that does the same.

Download in other formats:

Plain Text