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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.
Online versions
- Thomas Harriot, Mss. 6782
- Thomas Harriot, Mss. 6783
- Thomas Harriot, Mss. 6784
- Thomas Harriot, Mss. 6785
- Thomas Harriot, Mss. 6786
- Thomas Harriot, Mss. 6787
- Thomas Harriot, Mss. 6788
- Thomas Harriot, Mss. 6789
Versioned File Folders
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
To be written
Export
The maps can be exported to html so that a website could be constructed that displays all the maps and can be browsed.
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.
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.
As for formulas, it possible to use LaTeX markup. There will be a script that converts that code into MathML.
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 mode will be written that does the same.
