Darwin's writings are consequently of interest to an unusually wide variety of readers. It is to provide Darwin's writings free online that The complete work of Charles Darwin online has been organised. The project, designed and directed by Dr John van Wyhe (University of Cambridge), has been made possible by a generous three-year Resource Enhancement Grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council awarded to Professor James Secord (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge) and Professor Janet Browne (Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London). The project is hosted by the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), an ideal location for scholarly interdisciplinary work of this nature and close to the Darwin archive in Cambridge University Library. The project also employs a Research Associate, Dr Kees Rookmaaker, for manuscript transcription and to assist with editorial research. A complete set of Darwin's published works will also be published in print. A conference is also planned.
By integrating Darwin's books, articles and manuscripts with a full search engine and bibliographical catalogue, the site will be invaluable to students and scholars in the fields of history, history of science, literature, philosophy, the natural sciences and lay readers throughout the world. The project will digitise Darwin's complete publications and private manuscripts (excluding letters which are already being published by the Darwin Correspondence Project) in two forms: searchable text and facsimile image. The publications include forty-two volumes written or edited by Darwin and almost 300 shorter publications such as articles. The site will include all editions in English of Darwin's work published in his lifetime, and all known journal articles; variant editions/issues will also be provided in full, rather than corrected passages alone. There are plans to also include translations into other languages. (A group at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, is scanning reviews and translations in Danish.) Complete bibliographical information will be provided with each text. The Charles Darwin Trust is generously supplying most of the original volumes to be digitised from the Quentin Keynes' bequest and Jack Johns Collection. Canonical secondary sources will also be included such as Richard Darwin Keynes' edition of Darwin's Zoological Notes from the Beagle voyage, Nora Barlow's edition of Darwin's Autobiography (1958) and Francis Darwin's Life and letters (1887). In addition, Darwin's works will be enriched with links to contemporary reviews and related texts cited by Darwin. The site will be organised around a comprehensive database with entries for every known Darwin publication and manuscript world-wide. The site will be fully searchable, with hyperlinks interconnecting material. It will be the most complete, accessible and authoritative scholarly resource on Darwin ever created. The site (http://darwin-online.org.uk) should be launched on 15 December 2005.
The leading concern is to provide high-quality electronic copies of primary historical source materials quickly and cost-effectively to the world. It is important that primary materials can be used and searched in ways unrestricted by the interests or forethought of editors. Hence we shall not provide a variorum edition. Minimal but sufficient editorial matter will be provided. The project will not invest in costly and time-consuming thick encoding of texts in order to provide much more primary material with the same resources. Manuscript transcriptions will be given in clear text form using Tanselle's editorial principles. Deletions and insertions will be recorded when significant. The site will provide a split-screen facility so that users can see the actual manuscript next to the transcript, thus rendering it unnecessary to invest in labour-intensive editorial notation of, for example, the fact that a passage was written in the margin. This will also allow users to compare two different editions or two different books on the screen simultaneously. In the first instance, through the courtesy of Cambridge University Library, scans of microfilm images of the manuscripts will be used to quickly make them available on the internet. In the future it is hoped that, with further funding, the manuscripts will be digitally scanned in high-resolution colour.
The project will begin by first verifying a number of pre-existing manuscript transcriptions, provided by other scholars. To discover which untranscribed manuscripts are most desirable and to avoid duplication of effort, members of the Darwin research community were asked which manuscripts were most needed. These responses have been assembled to prioritise manuscript transcription. One of the first transcriptions, therefore, will be Darwin's Beagle pocket notebooks courtesy of English Heritage.
The backbone of the site will be a database consisting of a complete bibliographical and manuscript catalogue interlinking the entire collection of texts and images. The catalogue will list all known Darwin manuscripts in the world and links to those that have been digitised. The catalogue will incorporate Richard Freeman's Bibliographical Handlist (1977). Reproduction permission has been granted by the copyright owner, The Charles Darwin Trust together with many unpublished corrections. Editorial introductions will place each work in context and provide an overview of its content and significance. As far as possible, inexplicit references and persons will be identified. References to other writings by Darwin or other authors will be rendered into links taking the reader directly to the text referred to. Translations will be provided for non-English passages. All of the digitised texts will retain page or folio numbers and full formatting such as italics, allowing them to be used and cited by scholars in conventional ways.
University of Cambridge
November 22, 2005
Original web page at University of Cambridge
