History of Science and Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (I)

What’s the link between the Rutter project and sustainability? You will find out in this series of three posts.

At our project we draw directly from early modern scientific manuscripts, bringing them to light from half-forgotten shelves, showing their relevance, and making them available worldwide as much as possible.

Touching the sources themselves is key for an honest and fresh look into the past, for a real understanding, instead of a projection of our views, and this work can be exciting and fascinating, but it is hard work indeed, and it imposes limitations as far as open science and accessibility are concerned. Some typical scenarios are:

• Only one or just a few copies exist of a specific manuscript work, physically located in one/few libraries;
• The texts are hard to read unless the reader has a certain degree of expertise in paleography;
• The texts are written in the languages of the 15th-17th centuries;
• Some texts are considerably long, making it difficult to quickly retrieve information on specific topics.

Porllogo (instead of modern “Prólogo”) of the Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, from the oldest manuscript (ca. 1750) kept at the Public Library of Évora (BPE COD. CXV/1-3).

Applying Digital Humanities techniques to Iberian and Arabic maritime works opens new ways to approach these early scientific and technical texts and to bypass most of their limitations at once. The transcription of texts into digital formats (XML), following international standards (TEI), with the modernization of the language, makes them actually available from everywhere and to anyone, regardless of sex, nationality, age or race. More about this in the coming weeks, stay tuned! [S. Munzi and J. Acevedo]