Our Goals
Our vision is of a complete edition of Newton's manuscript and print legacy, including his extraordinary (and until recently largely neglected) 'non-scientific' writings. Newton's well-nigh obsessive interest in transmutational alchemy and his highly original and unorthodox theological views are of great interest both in their own right and for the light they shed on the thought and character of one of the world's greatest scientific geniuses. We intend to make the documents that chart these interests accessible free of charge to any Internet user, featuring:
- complete text-encoded transcripts, in both 'diplomatic' and 'normalised' versions - the former recording all the deletions, additions, errors and alterations made in the original document, the latter edited to yield something more like a 'finished' text
- high-resolution facsimile images of all the papers, and of the marginal annotations made by Newton to the books in his library, most of which still survive
- direct linkage of image to transcript, to enable users to verify our transcriptions and to see what Newton's original texts actually look like
- translations of non-English texts (and, ideally, translations of all texts into a variety of other languages)
- full scholarly apparatus and online access to a range of secondary material
- a powerful and versatile search engine
- accessibility in a range of formats according to the requirements and technical resources of different end-users
- interoperative linkage to related sites (so that other corpora can be searched in tandem with Newton's and connections between them more rapidly established and explored)
That is the vision, but we also have a grip on reality. The reality is that images are expensive, as are technical and philological expertise. The corpus is both vast and widely dispersed, and a range of issues has to be thrashed out with each of the institutions and individuals who own or have custody of these manuscripts regarding access, copyright, costs and fees, permission to make images available, and much more in the same vein. Though we have come a long way since 1998, we still have nothing approaching the level of staff, funding and technical know-how to make all this happen. But we really do have the vision and we are getting there. Our head may be in the clouds but our feet are on the ground. Anyone wishing to contribute to our efforts (financially or otherwise) should consult the Support The Newton Project page on this web site. Commercial profit is emphatically not one of our aims, and all money raised will be devoted to the development of the edition.
