Newton virtually meets Euler and Bernoulli

Introduction

Historians of science usually face challenges in accessing the literature for their research. In the past, they had difficulties with acquiring the data they needed due to missing digital formats as the manuscripts were lying in archives not accessible to all researchers. Although in the present time manuscripts are mostly digitized and transcribed, the digital editions are not connected. Today there are many online digital editions available, but each presented in an individual platform without any connection to other editions. For example, a historian of science interested in the mathematics of the 17th-18th century must search for the data in various platforms; works of Leonhard Euler and the mathematicians of the Bernoulli dynasty are available in the
Bernoulli-Euler Online platform
(BEOL),

Bernoulli-Euler Online,
BEOL
,

https://beol.dasch.swiss/

works of Isaac Newton in
The Newton Project
,

The Newton Project,

http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/

works of Gottfried Leibniz in the
Leibniz Archive
,

Leibniz Archive
,

https://www.gwlb.de/Leibniz/Leibnizarchiv/english/introduction/

etc.

Although most of these mathematicians were corresponding and had cited each other's works in their books and articles, this linkage of the data is not evident because the works of these mathematicians are currently presented in individual digital platforms which are not semantically linked. For a historian of mathematics who tries to track these mathematicians’ lines of thought, having access to the information about how the data is linked plays a crucial role. From this information, the researcher can find the origin of ideas, estimate the effects of one mathematician's contributions on works of others, observe the relation between ideas, etc. Therefore, having access to the literature of all contemporary mathematicians along with a graph representing the semantic connections of the data through one single platform will facilitate historians' research dramatically. In our project, we aim to provide such a platform without locally storing all digital editions.

Project Description

As the base platform which will provide access and semantic links to other edition projects, we are going to use the BEOL platform. Because it is based on Knora, a web-based virtual research environment for the humanities, providing various research tools to historians as an HTML based Restful API (Geer, 2016). As for editions,
BEOL
contains the correspondence of Leonhard Euler,

Leonhard Euler exchanged more than 3100 letters with 300 correspondents. Currently
BEOL
contains just Euler's correspondence with Christian Goldbach but eventually, it will integrate all of Euler’s and the Bernoullis’ correspondence as well as their articles and books (Alassi, 2018).

and of various members of the Bernoulli dynasty as XML-based online editions (Schweizer, 2017). On the other hand,
The Newton Project
is a TEI XML based digital edition project of Newton's correspondence and works. Since data in both projects are in a structured XML format, they prove to be the best candidates as a prototype. As proof of concept, we first attempt to connect the letter networks of the two projects.

Although Knora provides a generic storage system, an RDF triplestore, our aim is not to store all the data of
The Newton Project
in
BEOL
,

Unlike the similar project
ePistolarium
which stores all the editions of works of Descartes and Huygens locally, we will attempt to avoid the redundancy of data by retrieving the data from
The Newton Project
on demand. In this way, there won't be any need to update the database of
BEOL
by every editorial change in third-party repositories

instead we just store the metadata of letters,

The original facsimiles of Newton's correspondence are served externally by the Cambridge university digital libraries.

such as the date of creation, authors, recipients, URIs pointing to the facsimiles of Newton letters, subjects discussed in the letters, etc. These metadata will be extracted from letters of
The Newton Project
and will be imported into
BEOL
. The correspondents and mentioned persons of the letters will then be linked to the existing persons of
BEOL
, and the letters containing specific subjects will be connected to
BEOL
letters about the same topic, see Figure. 1.

Figure.1 Brief depiction of project framework and data model as RDF triples

Furthermore, with the search features of Knora, a
BEOL
user can perform specific queries on the data, for example, to acquire all letters written in a specific date interval by a specific person. Knora will then check the entire
BEOL
database to retrieve all the letters complying with this search criteria. The search results which are originally part of
BEOL
will be directly presented to the user in
SALSAH
,

SALSAH,
System for Annotation and Linkage of Sources in Arts and Humanities

https://dhlab-basel.github.io/Salsah/

the graphical user interface of Knora, and the results which are originally part of
The Newton Project
will be retrieved from the server of
The Newton Project
and presented to the user in
SALSAH
. Moreover, there will be a search component integrated into
The Newton Project
with which the users of
The Newton Project
can benefit from the search functionality of Knora to perform advanced queries on the database of
The Newton Project
.

Lastly, since
BEOL
users have their own work-space in which they can access the data and annotate it, it is important that when users are working on resources retrieved from
The Newton Project
, they have permanent access to the state of the letters which they were initially presented. Therefore, in case, a user starts to annotate a resource, a stable version of the retrieved Newton letter will be cached and stored in Knora in order to both preserve user's annotations and keep track of the user's works on a resource through versioning functionality of Knora. Caching the data can be avoided if the third-party repository- in this case
The Newton Project
-provides versioning of data. Then the required version of the data will be fetched from that repository.

Conclusion

Connecting the repositories of digital editions will preserve the information which would be difficult to access without semantically linking the data. In general, establishing a link between repositories will be useful for all disciplines of humanities. In
BEOL
focus is on the early modern mathematics but all the features developed for this project will be generic and can be used for other projects in humanities.

Bibliography

Alassi, S. et al
(2018). A digital edition of Leonhard Euler’s correspondence with Christian Goldbach.
Digital Humanities 2018
.

https://dh2018.adho.org/a-digital-edition-of-leonhard-eulers-correspondence-with-christian-goldbach/

Geer, B. et al
(2016).
Knowledge, Organization, Representation, and Annotation
. Digital Humanities Lab

http://www.knora.org/

.

Schweizer, T. et al
(2017). Integrating historical scientific texts into the Bernoulli-Euler online platform.
Digital Humanities 2017
.

https://dh2017.adho.org/abstracts/147/147.pdf

.