Jane Squire, Lady Longitude

Among the many candidates who applied for the longitude prize announced in 1714 by the British government were, as far as is known, at least two women: Jane Squire (1686-1743) and Elizabeth Johnson (1721-1800). The latter did so much later, towards the end of the eighteenth century, but Squire developed her proposal during the 1730s and gave it to the press in 1742 under the title A Proposal to Determine our Longitude (a second edition appeared in 1743). The work collects several letters exchanged between Squire and the “Board of Longitude”, in which the mathematician complains of discriminatory treatment because she was a woman. One of them, written on January 16, 1742, reads as follows:

To the Honorable the Board of Commissioners for discovering the Longitude. […] I sent a Copy of this Table of Longitude to Sir Charles Wager, as first commissioner, in 1732: but as I have reason given me to apprehend, that (coming from a Woman) it is either thrown away, or given away; I send another, with this form.

Her discouragements in this regard were shared with Sir Thomas Hanmer (1677-1746), one of the Board’s commissioners, who replied as follows:

All I can say to the Disappointments you meet with when you address yourself to the Commissioners for the Longitude is this, that your good sense I am sure will tell you that you are expected to lie under some Prejudice upon account of your Sex. Man, arrogant man, assumes to himself the Prerogative of Science, and when a Woman offers to teach them in any of the abstruse Parts of it, they are apt to turn a disdainful Ear. To this arrogance therefore, I believe you are to impute their Want of Attention to you upon this occasion, and I have long despaired of finding the Cure of their Faults…

Squire’s proposal mixed religious and astronomical elements, and consisted, roughly speaking, in the fragmentation of the firmament into more than a million fractions that could be easily distinguished by sailors, from which they could calculate their position in longitude. Although impractical, Squire’s audacity in bringing her proposal to the “Board” and into print has, in recent times, allowed her work and her figure to be studied with the attention it deserves. If you want to know more about her, I recommend you to take a look at Alexi Baker’s works. [José María Moreno Madrid]

Abreast of the Times

The stereotype of an (Early Modern) historian at work is someone spending day after day in the silence of a library, surrounded by ancient, dusty manuscripts—and perhaps this is true in most cases, except for the dust. However, while ancient manuscripts are still the main source for generating new knowledge, the way historians approach them has changed enormously thanks to evolving technology.

Powerful tools are revolutionizing the discipline and ushering the era of digital humanities. A main consequence is the easiness with which we can now access the textual corpora: digital archives like RUTTER’s “A Sea of Books” allow us to reach with a click manuscripts preserved thousands of miles away, and devices like the ScanTents available at the BnF turn the long waits and excessive prices required by libraries scanning services obsolete and unnecessary. But the groundbreaking achievements were made in the way of collecting and elaborating data, such as the possibility to automate demanding processes like manuscript transcriptions. We can thus thank the Transkribus team if, for example, in June 2023 the first Portuguese model for automatic transcription of manuscripts will be presented.

Unfortunately, for a long time the supervision required by digital work was not available to students willing to walk this path, and still today some institutions are not well equipped in this sense. This gap has been partially filled by alternative training opportunities like workshops, where students and researchers can acquire new skills.

The first workshops on computational skills applied to history seem to date to the period 1974-1982 at the Newberry Library in Chicago, as reported by Adam Crymble in his book Technology and the historian: transformations in the digital age. Since then, the initiatives have multiplied, nationally and internationally, including courses and summer schools, discussion groups and, currently, a large variety of online resources.

Inspired by the desire to learn and share this new knowledge, the RUTTER training school “The Long Life of Manuscripts: From Material to Immaterial Texts” has been planned to take place in Lisbon in September 2023. This course will provide a thorough overview of multidisciplinary approaches to early modern scientific writing practices, and registrations are open. Going over crucial moments of historical research, the participants will gain familiarity with a great variety of written texts, sources and case studies, as well as general competencies of the digital tools applied to historical research. All these core skills will help researchers to use historical knowledge to demystify simplistic ideas and interpret scientific phenomena in a new way. If you are interested, do let us know! Registrations are now open here. [Silvana Munzi]

Wiki Musings

Two weeks ago we had our first RUTTER/CIUHCT Wikipedia edit-a-thon at the Faculty of Sciences, with colleagues from several projects and sub-disciplines joining to edit specific articles on History of Science, mostly dealing with navigation, but also calendars and globes. We contributed contents to the English, German, Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedias, and even to correct a related blip on Wikidata. We had time to discuss not only the practicalities, dos and don’ts of editing the Wikis, but also interesting conversations about the general principles and intent of the Wikimedia movement, and its relations to academia.

Incidentally, the following day was the first of the annual Portuguese Wikimedia convention, this year with the explicit aim of “bringing the Wikimedia closer to the academic, scientific and cultural domains.” The contagious and energetic enthusiasm of this small community made me reflect further on how and why these two worlds, that of the academic institutions and that of free and open knowledge communities may or should intersect and interact.

On a practical level, it might seem obvious that the Wiki world has a technical know-how that can help the diffusion of a contents held by academia—but in practice there is much overlap here, and this instrumental relation is far from clear cut.

More essentially, what these worlds have in common is dialogue. Dialogue does not mean a conversation between two people (that would be a duologue), but a word, or simply language (logos) that moves through (dia), that is communicated. More specifically, dialogue means discursive thought in motion, an articulated body of language that moves like a wind, anywhere it wants to go. It is in the nature of knowledge to flow, or fly, or flash around. From a human subjective point of view, the basic requirement for this is a will to share, the sheer pleasure and selfless act of sharing knowledge, of contributing to an ever-imperfect, and yet ever-perfecting body of knowledge.

Wikipedia has many shortcomings, and the academic world has many shortcomings—it cannot be otherwise, because the sum of human knowledge is imperfect. The thrill and the reward of science is in the making, in the sharing, and for that, we look forward to future sessions, and we wish success to our colleagues of both worlds. [Juan Acevedo]