Celestial Machines: Caroline Herschel Astronomical Notebooks and the material culture of predigital communication systems

该项目是一个合作博士项目，博士生被设想为一个基于档案的努力，学生在皇家学会的藏品中进行现场研究。因此，该学生将被视为图书馆和档案馆团队的一员，并将接受适当的技能和职责培训。该项目的重点是卡罗琳·赫歇尔（1750-1848）的科学手稿，她是第一批在《皇家学会哲学学报》上发表文章的女性之一，也是一名专业天文学家。尽管这些手稿的准确性、精确性和对19世纪天文学和天体力学基础的中心地位早已被公认，但她手稿中的信息仍然是一个相对尚未开发的互动科学交流、合作和创新的宝库。学生将研究赫歇尔如何使用天文笔记本作为造纸机；也就是说，作为交互式信息管理设备，帮助她与其他形式的前数字通信媒体进行交互。她的笔记的这种材料和信息的结合方面将被用来探索当时天文图像制作和笔记实践所固有的优势和障碍。其目的是双重的。首先，确定并将她在笔记本中使用的主要手稿信息管理技术历史化，以驯服欧洲和殖民地背景下的天文学家提供给她的视觉和文本数据，这些数据来自大量的纸条、残片、纸张、目录、分类账、日记本和信件。其次，研究她如何将笔记本作为个人观察工具，帮助她与望远镜和其他相关形式的物质文化接触。该项目并没有将赫歇尔的前数字数据管理设备的起源仅仅归因于精英，尤其是男性，大学和学术团体，而是试图突出她的方法是如何源于她自己的聪明才智，她早年作为音乐家的经历，以及她作为赫歇尔家庭管理者的角色。沿着这条道路，该项目将扩展我们对她如何在开发天文学和天体力学手稿世界中使用的实时数据管理技术中发挥重要作用的理解。总的来说，该项目将表明，当作为实时设备时，每个笔记本都成为一个互动的人工制品，一个等待了两个多世纪的媒体界面档案，等待被重新发现。通过关注卡罗琳·赫歇尔并探索她作为首批受薪女科学家之一的角色，该项目将使这位成功的博士生和监督团队能够推进皇家学会和达勒姆大学的承诺，以增加STEM的多样性，包括代表性不足的群体，并发展一个科学知识向所有人开放的世界。由于没有卡罗琳·赫歇尔的学术传记，这个项目是及时的，将引起历史学家和更广泛的学术界和公众的兴趣。

The project is a Collaborative Doctoral Project with a PhD studentship envisaged as an archive-based endeavour, with the student engaged in on-site research within the Royal Society's collections. Therefore, the student will be considered as a member of the Library and Archive team and will receive training in the appropriate skills and duties. The project focuses on the scientific manuscripts of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), one of the first women to publish articles in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and to be a professional astronomer. Though long recognised for their accuracy, precision and centrality to the foundations of nineteenth-century astronomy and celestial mechanics, the information in her manuscripts has remained a relatively untapped treasure trove of interactive scientific communication, collaboration and innovation.The student will investigate how Herschel used astronomical notebooks as paper machines; that is, as interactive information management devices that helped her interface with other forms of predigital communications media. This jointly material and informatic aspect of her notebooks will be used to explore the advantages and obstacles inherent to the astronomical image-making and note-keeping practices of the time. The aims are twofold. First, to identify and historicise the main manuscript information management techniques she used within her notebooks to tame the visual and textual data supplied to her by astronomers based in Europe and colonial settings via a plethora of slips, scraps, sheets, catalogues, ledgers, daybooks and letters. Second, to examine how she used her notebooks as personal observation tools that helped her interface with telescopes and other associated forms of material culture.Rather than solely attributing the origins of Herschel's predigital data management devices to elite, and eminently male, universities and scholarly societies, the project seeks to highlight how her methods originated from her own ingenuity, her early years as a musician, and her role as manager of the Herschel household. In following this path, the project will extend our understanding of how she played an essential role in developing the realtime data management techniques that were used in the manuscript world of astronomy and celestial mechanics. Overall, the project will show that, when treated as a realtime device, each notebook becomes an interactive artefact, an archive of media interface that has been waiting over two centuries to be rediscovered.By focusing on Caroline Herschel and exploring her role as one of the first salaried female scientists, the project will allow the successful PhD student and the supervisory team to advance the commitment of the Royal Society and Durham University to increase diversity in STEM, to include underrepresented groups, and to develop a world in which scientific knowledge is open to all. Since there is no academic biography of Caroline Herschel, the project is timely and will be of interest to historians and the wider academy and public.