Output details

Roger North’s Scientific Manuscripts

Medium: This website brings together transcriptions of a number of volumes of manuscripts with essays and annotations laying out Roger North's ideas. Using this innovative digital format to update and transform the genre of the scholarly edition Ford creates a highly flexible forum that maximizes the multi-facetted presentation of his research, both making accessible archival materials as well as his historical commentary upon them. Additional links take users to other relevant and connected sites. At the time of date-stamping the website contains 200,000 words.

Research imperatives and process: There is no monographic work on North's science and this website makes a contribution to the online resources for the history of science as well as the history of art and optics. The website frames the transcriptions and places North’s ideas and polemic in their philosophical and social context. It contains a number of essays on North and his science (championing Descartes and challenging Newton). Ford has developed an online format which updates and expands the possibilities of the scholarly edition, including a full and flexible apparatus for notations and additional links. At the same time, it connects users with the historical archive by making clear the structure and physical character of the original text, for instance the points at which the page turns and so on. Containing a full introduction and scholarly annotations, Ford has aimed to maintain the feel of North’s original manuscript, with errata and corrections. This is the first full scholarly edition of North’s writings to be executed in this way (F.J.M. Korsten transcribed a representative set of manuscripts in the 1970s, but these were edited for the modern reader and are more translations than transcriptions).