Crowdsourcing Transcription: The Davy Notebooks Project 2019-2024

Since 2019, 3841 volunteers from around the world helped transcribe 11,416 pages of Sir Humphry Davy’s notebooks and lecture notes, most of which are held in the Royal Institution in London. In this talk, Professor Sharon Ruston will discuss the highs and lows of a crowdsourcing project and reflect upon some of the findings that have come from it. The notebooks offer a huge variety of subject matter, from Davy’s early nitrous oxide trials to his isolation of potassium and sodium, agricultural chemistry, galvanism, and enormous amounts of poetry. They also feature his shopping lists, to-do lists, reading lists, diary entries and travel writing as well as gossip about his scientific contemporaries. You can see the results here: https://digitalcollections.lancaster.ac.uk/collections/davy.

Since its launch in 2021, the Lancaster Digital Collections platform has been a key enabler in achieving the strategic goals articulated in our library vision. Lancaster Digital Collections is built upon an open source platform, originally developed at the University of Cambridge. We are a member of the Digital Collections Platform Community (CDCP) with Cambridge and the University of Manchester. This collaborative partnership aims to be an internationally recognised hub for image collections and a catalyst for new and emerging digitally enabled research. This talk will provide an overview of the LDC platform and the Library's involvement in the Davy Notebook Project.

To register complete this form.  A UoL email address is required to register.  Open to staff and AHC PGR students.  This is an IN-PERSON event.

Speakers:

Andy Hartland is the Library Systems Digital Developer in the Library's Digital Innovation Team and led on the technical development of the Davy Notebooks on Lancaster Digital Collections.

Tim Leonard is Associate Director (Space, Experience and Innovation) at Lancaster University Library. He oversees the Library's frontline services, the development of its learning spaces, and its digital systems, including Lancaster Digital Collections.

Professor Sharon Ruston is Chair in Romanticism at the English Literature and Creative Writing department at Lancaster University. She has published The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein (2021), Creating Romanticism (2013), Romanticism: An Introduction (2010), and Shelley and Vitality (2005). She co-edited The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy for Oxford University Press (2020) and led the AHRC-funded project to transcribe all of the Davy’s notebooks. With Greg Tate and Frank James, she is co-editing The Poetry of Humphry Davy for UCL Press.