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Isaac Newton's Notes Digitized
First time accepted submitter nhstar writes with an excerpt from an article in the Register: "If you're looking for a bit of light reading this holiday season, Cambridge University is here to help: they've digitized and made available online over 4,000 pages of the pioneering scientist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton's most important works. 'Anyone, wherever they are, can see at the click of a mouse how Newton worked and how he went about developing his theories and experiments,' Cambridge University Library's digitization manager Grant Young told the BBC."
Eh, seeing how Newton was involved in one of the most famous IP-theft disputes in history this is more than a bit ironic.
-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're probably not even my own. you know what, ju
As far as I can tell:
1. You can't link to a specific page in the archive, which makes sharing a bit tricky; and
2. You can't download full-resolution pages.
Still a useful resource to have, but it's a bit unfortunate that these kinds of digitization projects seem to always want to roll-their-own slightly opaque interface.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Newton was a prolific writer and wrote more on theology than anything else (he was a theologean as well as a scientist, alchemist, etc), one example is that he wrote almost a million words looking for meaning in the numerology of 666, including a 6X6 magic square that contained only primes and summed to 666 on each row, column, and diagonal. He also claimed that "Jesus was sent to Earth to operate the levers of gravity". He is remebered for his undeniable genius in science, most of his other writings are (by modern standards) the ramblings of a madman.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'm one of the members of this project and this post has irked me (to say the least). I think what has bothered me most are the assumptions that the poster made.
The costs that the poster gave show no connection with the reality of academic funding in the humanities in the UK. We were generously funded by JISC and two anonymous donors (for whose support we are extremely grateful) - the total funds were approximately 0.00125% of the 8 billion.
All the work was done in-house by what amounted to less than three full-time positions working for nine months. Approximately half were responsible for digitising/encoding the materials (images and XML) and 1.5 full-time position's worth of work was involved in the development of the front and backends for the project - all of which are based on open-source software.
More importantly, these materials are all open access. The Newton Project (http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk) has been releasing its materials as open access resources for over a decade. This was _before_ UK HE funding bodies made it a requirement.