Indiana University is one of only five American research institutions selected to host a 2014 CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Early Modern Studies. The other host institutions are Carnegie Mellon University, the Folger Shakespeare Library, UCLA, and the University of Pennsylvania.  The five, fully-funded fellowships will provide recent Ph.D.s with professional development, education, and training opportunities in data curation for Early Modern Studies.

At Indiana University, the fellow will contribute primarily to The Chymistry of Isaac Newton project, an online, scholarly and critical edition of Sir Isaac Newton’s alchemical manuscripts comprised of nearly a million words, which have been transcribed and encoded according to the Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI). Since Newton used literally hundreds of alchemical works ranging in origin from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century to prepare his transcriptions and florilegia, the text analysis tools developed for this project will have implications far beyond Newton scholarship alone, particularly as machine readable versions of Newton’s source texts become more readily available. We expect that the approaches that are developed by the fellow, in collaboration with Indiana University faculty, librarians and technologists, will be applicable to other projects in Early Modern Studies.

Through work on the Newton project as well as others, the CLIR fellow will have direct access to experts across a wide range of faculty, librarians and technologists, including experts in metadata analysis, text encoding, imaging specialists, large scale data mining, data curation and preservation systems, system and tool developers, and more. The fellow will participate fully in the vast professional development offerings at Indiana University, including activities in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Library programs such as the Digital Library Brown Bag Series, campus programs such as the College’s Catapult Center for Digital Humanities and Computational Analysis workshops and courses, and more.

This news item was adapted from a longer version available on the CLIR website.