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Humphry Davy's Notebooks: How Poetry Helped Create Scientific Knowledge

Funder: UK Research and InnovationProject code: AH/V002015/1
Funded under: AHRC Funder Contribution: 812,448 GBP

Humphry Davy's Notebooks: How Poetry Helped Create Scientific Knowledge

Description

In 2019, AHRC funding enabled the crowdsourced transcriptions of five notebooks kept by the nineteenth-century chemist, Sir Humphry Davy, between 1795 and 1805. Transcriptions of these notebooks revealed Davy's creative mind at work: lines of poetry were written among descriptions of chemical experiments, philosophical musings, geological drawings, and accounts of his life. With this new project, we will crowdsource transcriptions of his entire notebook collection: there are 65 held at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI), in London, and five held in Kresen Kernow in Redruth, Cornwall. Davy kept notebooks throughout his life but most of the pages of these notebooks have never been transcribed before. The notebooks show that he was writing poetry in the laboratory while conducting scientific experiments. Most entries have yet to be dated or considered in the light of what they tell us about Davy, his scientific discoveries, and the relationship between poetry and science. We will crowdsource transcriptions of the notebooks using the people-powered research platform Zooniverse. Online and in-person discussions with participants will enable us to find out how transcribing Davy's notebooks changes their view of how poetry and science could co-exist today. The consequences of seeing the arts and sciences as divided and separate are serious. Viewing them as 'two cultures' hinders our ability to solve major world problems. Speaking to a named priority area in the AHRC's 2019 Delivery Plan, 'Arts and science, arts in science', this project will ask what we can learn from the example of Davy's notebooks that will help us rethink what we understand about the relationship between the arts and sciences in the nineteenth century and today. Davy was the foremost 'man of science' of his time. He isolated more chemical elements than any individual has before or since. Between October and December 1815, he invented a miners' safety lamp that came to be known as the Davy Lamp, saving countless lives in Britain and Europe and vastly improving the nation's industrial capability. He also led a fascinating life, rising up through society's ranks from relatively modest origins to become the President of the Royal Society. His politics and religious beliefs changed from radical to conservative as his career progressed. Davy is not currently associated with poetry or well known as a poet, but the notebooks show that he was writing poetry in the laboratory while conducting scientific experiments throughout his life. Many of these poems will be transcribed and published for the first time on the Lancaster Digital Library and in a selected print edition. We will disseminate research findings, encourage participation in the project, and ask key questions in our public engagement and impact events, which include two transcribe-a-thons, a map-a-thon, a workshop on how to use the newly-developed transcription tools in other crowdsourcing projects, an academic conference on poetry in nineteenth-century scientific notebooks, a computer masterclass using data produced by the project, and an event that will consider Davy's attitude to race. We will also create an exhibition of Davy's and others' notebooks held at the RI, which will travel to the north-west and north-east of England. We will present two panel sessions at academic conferences and produce a special issue of an academic journal on the results of the project. The already-existing Massive Online Open Course (MOOC), previously funded by the AHRC, will be enhanced to feature new tasks specifically on the notebooks. Final transcriptions of whole collection of notebooks will be published, with images of the pages themselves, on the Lancaster Digital Library, with improved new and exciting features. An accompanying project website will present a map of Davy's life, utilising the information that emerges from this project and a previous AHRC-funded project on Davy's letters.

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