Multidimensional Chronological Analysis of Manuscript Corpora Using Isaac Newton's Chymical Papers as a Test Platform

一般观众摘要研究手稿材料的学者遇到了许多困难，除了一个明显的事实，即笔迹可能难以阅读和模棱两可。确定写作不同阶段的时间往往是一个重要的问题，就像早期现代科学技术手稿的情况一样，这些手稿往往在作者S去世后被分开甚至肢解并重新组装，比如达芬奇、伽利略、罗伯特·博伊尔和艾萨克·牛顿的论文，仅举几例。因此，解决大型手稿语料库的年代测定问题将对许多领域的研究人员有利，更不用说图书馆管理员和博物馆工作人员了。本提案旨在利用艾萨克？牛顿？S的超大型手稿Nachlass作为一个平台，探索多种技术，包括计算技术和其他技术，用于确定手稿的年代并对其进行相互结合的评估。除了提供重要的历史信息，使学者能够掌握牛顿？S化学语料库的年代发展，这具有重大的公共利益和学术兴趣，本项目中使用的工具和方法将适用于任何研究领域中包含未注明日期的手稿材料的所有其他项目，而不仅仅是科学史。这项建议的最终影响将是提高公众对牛顿？S化学研究的认识，这一领域将有助于激发受众对科学的兴趣，受众范围从K-12学生到具有广泛智力兴趣的专业人士。该项目将使用的技术包括通过大量计算技术(如潜在语义分析和主题建模)自动生成的平行段落的比较，通过拉曼光谱对墨水和论文进行光谱分析，通过最新的成像技术比较水印，跟踪拼写和手写的发展，以及对引文的系统研究，通过制作权威的电子书目，并在正文中提供引文的超链接，促进了这一进程。除了应用这些多重技术外，该项目还将采用一种综合办法来评估由这些技术产生的数据。为了实现这一结果，该项目将使用网络图分析，制作手稿和段落的视觉集群，这些手稿和段落各自的年代标记相互关联。使用不同技术(例如墨迹分析和水印分析)的独立测试运行所产生的相关性随后将使用图像图相互比较。如果没有干净的图形覆盖，团队成员将重新检查数据，并确定不适合的原因。还将开发测量技术来确定构成良好匹配和较差匹配的一致性程度。结果将是一个模型，用于确定大型文本语料库中可移植到其他项目的部分的相对年表。

General Audience Summary Scholars who work with manuscript materials encounter numerous difficulties beyond the obvious fact that handwriting can be difficult and ambiguous to read. The problem of dating the different stages of composition is often a significant issue, as in the case of early modern scientific and technological manuscripts, which were often separated or even dismembered and reassembled after the author?s death, as with the papers of Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, to name just a few. A solution to the problems posed by dating large manuscript corpora would therefore be of benefit to researchers in many areas scholarship, not to mention librarians and museum workers. The present proposal aims to use Isaac Newton?s very large manuscript Nachlass as a platform for exploring multiple techniques, including computational techniques and others, for dating manuscripts and for assessing them in combination with one another. In addition to providing important historical information that will enable scholars to come to grips with the chronological development of Newton?s chymical corpus, which is of substantial public interest as well as of scholarly interest, the tools and approaches that are to be used in this project will be transportable to all other projects that contain undated manuscript material in any field of inquiry, not just the history of science. A final impact of the proposal will be to further public awareness of Newton?s chymical research, an area that will help to stimulate interest in science in an audience that ranges from K-12 students up to professionals with widely diverse intellectual interests.Technical Summary The techniques that are to be used in this project include comparison of parallel passages generated automatically by a barrage of computational techniques (e.g. Latent Semantic Analysis and Topic Modeling), spectro-metric analysis of inks and papers by Raman spectroscopy, comparison of watermarks by means of the latest imaging technologies, tracking of developments in orthography and handwriting, and the systematic study of citations, facilitated by the production of an authoritative electronic bibliography with hyperlinks to the citations in texts. In addition to applying these multiple techniques, the project will follow an integrative approach to assessing the data generated by them. In order to achieve this result, the project will use network graph analysis to produce visual clusters of manuscripts and passages whose respective chronological markers correlate with one another. Correlations generated by independent test-runs employing different techniques (e.g. ink-analysis and watermark-analysis) will then be compared to one another, using image graphs. In cases where a clean overlay of graphs does not result, team members will revisit the data and determine the cause of the poor ?fit.? Metrical techniques will also be developed for determining the degree of agreement that constitutes good versus poor fit. The result will be a model for determining relative chronology of the parts within large textual corpora that will be transportable to other projects.