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

一般读者摘要研究手稿材料的学者除了难以辨认和模糊不清的笔迹这一明显事实外，还会遇到许多困难。确定写作的不同阶段的年代往往是一个重要的问题，就像早期现代科学和技术手稿的情况一样，这些手稿经常被分开，甚至被肢解，然后在作者之后重新组装。他的死，就像列奥纳多达芬奇，伽利略，罗伯特波义耳和艾萨克牛顿的论文一样，仅举几例。因此，解决大型手稿语料库的断代问题将有利于许多领域的研究人员，更不用说图书馆员和博物馆工作人员了。目前的建议旨在使用艾萨克牛顿？Nachlass是一个探索多种技术的平台，包括计算技术和其他技术，用于确定手稿的年代，并将它们相互结合起来进行评估。 除了提供重要的历史信息，使学者们能够掌握牛顿的时间发展？的化学语料库，这是大量的公共利益，以及学术兴趣，工具和方法，将在这个项目中使用的将是可移植的所有其他项目，包含未注明日期的手稿材料在任何领域的调查，而不仅仅是科学史。该提案的最终影响将是进一步提高公众对牛顿的认识？的化学研究，这一领域将有助于激发从K-12学生到具有广泛不同知识兴趣的专业人士的观众对科学的兴趣。技术概述本项目中使用的技术包括比较通过大量计算技术自动生成的平行段落（例如潜在语义分析和主题建模），通过拉曼光谱对墨水和纸张进行光谱分析，通过最新的成像技术比较水印，跟踪正字法和手写体的发展，以及对引文的系统研究，通过制作一个权威性的电子参考书目，并提供文本中引文的超链接，为这一工作提供了便利。除了应用这些多种技术外，该项目还将采用综合方法评估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来产生手稿和段落的视觉集群，其各自的时间标记彼此相关。采用不同技术（例如墨水分析和水印分析）的独立测试运行产生的相关性将使用图像图进行相互比较。如果没有清晰的图形覆盖，团队成员将重新访问数据并确定不良原因？合身还将开发测量技术，以确定构成良好拟合与不良拟合的一致程度。其结果将是一个模型，用于确定大型文本语料库中各部分的相对年表，这些语料库将可移植到其他项目中。

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.