"It's Volatile": Standards- Based Research & Research-Based Standards Development

You even have
my field guide. It's you I love.
I have believed so long
in the magic of names and poems
I hadn't thought them bodiless
at all. Tall Buttercup. Wild Vetch.
"Often I am permitted to return
to a meadow." It all seemed real to me
last week. Words. You are the body
of my world, root and flower, the
brightness and surprise of birds.
I miss you, love. Tell Leif
you're the names of things.
—Robert Hass, “Letter”
It's volatile because anciently painted
with wings in this manner whence came
this character
☿
for mercury.
— Sir Isaac Newton, “Praxis,”
Babson Collection (Burndy Library Collection)
MS. 420, Huntington Library
Digital humanities scholarship often integrates
humanities scholarship (literary studies,
historical studies, and so on) with technological
research and development. Some of this
technological work takes the form of standards
development. The most noteworthy example
of such standards development in the digital
humanities community is the Text Encoding
Initiative (TEI). The TEI provides Guidelines
for encoding texts for scholarly and general
use. The TEI is pervasive in digital humanities
and digital library contexts. It is a de facto
standard developed and evolved over the past
twenty some years through the efforts of a
number of dedicated scholars, librarians, and
technologists, and with input from the larger
community of TEI users.
Another standard of significance to the
digital humanities community is Unicode. Our
paper presents a case-study of a successful
effort to have included in the Unicode
standard dozens of characters required by the
Chymistry of Isaac Newton
, an ongoing digital
humanities project to digitize and edit, study
and analyze the alchemical works of Isaac
Newton and to develop various scholarly tools
around the collection. Unicode has become
the universal character encoding standard.
Unicode is nothing more, as it is certainly
nothing less, than a massive mapping of
characters to numbers, a mapping that seeks
to accommodate all the world’s languages
and writing systems, including symbols of all
sorts—mathematical symbols and operators,
astronomical and astrological symbols, Zapf
Dingbats, and many more. Operating systems,
and the applications built upon them—
databases, word processors and text editors,
browsers, graphics software, and games—
depend on such mappings, or encodings, to
reliably reference, store, input, output, and
display textual data. The Unicode Consortium’s
“What is Unicode” page
http://unicode.org/s
tandard/WhatIsUnicode.html
accurately reports
the standard’s significance: "Unicode is required
by modern standards such as XML, Java,
ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0,
WML, etc., and is the official way to implement
ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many
operating systems, all modern browsers, and
many other products. The emergence of the
Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools
supporting it, are among the most significant
recent global software technology trends."
In spite of Unicode’s impressive
comprehensiveness, it does not include every
character ever used. It does not at present,
for instance, include many of the alchemical
symbols found in Isaac Newton’s alchemical
writings. Unicode provides a “private use area,”
a series of reserved
code points
(the numbers
assigned to characters) for projects and products
to use “privately” for mapping to characters
not represented in Unicode. A project like the
Chymistry of Isaac Newton
can make use of
this private use area to map to characters that
are not already described in the standard. A
pitfall of the Private Use Area is that it is
meant to be used privately; it is not suitable
for easily interchangeable or interoperable data.

2
One project’s implementation of the Private
Use Area could conflict with another project’s.
And fonts would not typically include characters
for Private Use Area code points, since by
their nature these codepoints are not assigned
permanently to any one character but are
perpetually open for
private
assignment, not as
part of the public standard.
So when a project stumbles upon a rich
collection of important characters and symbols
that are relevant and useful beyond the
interior confines of one’s own project, one can
make a significant scholarly contribution by
documenting and describing these characters
and proposing them for inclusion in the
Unicode encoding standard. The alchemical
symbols so common in Isaac Newton’s chymical
manuscripts, are common also throughout
manuscript and print alchemical literature. The
graphically and semantically rich symbols also
have potential utility in design, computer art,
and even gaming applications. Even the few
symbols that are potentially unique to Newton
are worthy of consideration in the Unicode
standard, given Newton’s stature as one of the
giants of science and the vast wealth of scientific,
historical, biographical, and popular literature
related to Newton.
Figure 1. Basil Valentine. “A Table of Chymicall &
Philosophicall Charecters with their signs.”
The Last
Will and Testament of Basil Valentine
, 1671. These
and other symbols are commonly found in Newton.
The process by which one moves a Unicode
proposal through the development, review,
and approval process is formal and rigorous.
It is very rewarding in fostering a better
understanding of one’s source material and in
pointing the way to undiscovered or avoided
basic research questions. To encode and identify
characters and symbols, one must name the
things, and naming is indeed a very difficult
and powerful task, a task often challenged and
enriched by puzzling ambiguity and obscurity.
The process is very rewarding also because
it is very much peer-reviewed. Our proposal
greatly benefited from an iterative review and
excellent advice, challenging questions, and
constructive criticism from a number of very
smart, helpful, interested experts serving on the
Unicode Technical Committee (UTC).