Around the World in (Almost!) 80 Collections

The image above is an 1886 map “showing at a glance the geographical position of all the plants used in the British Pharmacopoeia” as well as “plants indigenous to Great Britain.” The map is part of a manual identifying plants used for medicinal purposes. This is just one example of the many items in the Science History Institute's digital collections. Some, like this map and manual, are explicitly geographical. But using data and new digital tools, almost anything in our collections can tell a story about the world.

The digital collections at the Science History Institute is an online database containing digitized and “born-digital” works from the Othmer Library for Chemical History, the Center for Oral History, the Institute’s archives, and its museum collections. This online database makes our materials easier for users to access and helps preserve our physical and digital materials.

Objects in the digital collections can be “born digital,” meaning that the content of significance is a digital object stored on some type of medium, such as a file on a floppy disk or a film on a DVD.

You can also find items in the digital collections that represent a physical object, such as a book or a museum object. When we create a digitization of a physical object, we take high-resolution images with minimal image processing to replicate the original item's appearance in a neutral setting to the best degree possible.

Here are some examples of items you might discover while browsing our digital collections:

• A photograph of a woman named Mrs. M. Murray using a nitrometer at the Fixed Nitrogen Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.
• A gold-plated stem pessary (an early intrauterine device)
• A letter from Percy Lavon Julian, a prominent African American chemist, admonishing the American Chemical Society for including a list of “Hotels for Colored Persons” at the organization's 1956 annual meeting
• A manuscript on the preparation of the philosophers' stone handwritten by Isaac Newton
• An oral history interview with Carolyn Bertozzi, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Institute's 2023 Ullyot lecturer
• An educational film about plastics in which a high school student is transported to the Middle Ages

There are nearly 80 sub-collections within the digital collections repository, each of which corresponds to a grouping within the Institute’s four collecting departments. For example, the  Papers of James Curtis Booth Collection  includes any items digitized from the corresponding archival collection (also titled the  Papers of James Curtis Booth .) The  Roy G. Neville Collection  consists of the digitized library materials donated by the noted chemist and bibliophile Roy G. Neville, and the  Immigration and Innovation Oral History Project  contains oral history interviews processed as part of a specific grant-funded project. You can explore all collections  here , but keep in mind, that not everything in the digital collections is a part of a sub-collection!

Metadata accompanies each digital object in the digital collections. This is structured information that describes the object as well as any administrative or technical details concerning the work or files. Metadata fields are indexed and faceted to ensure works accurately populate search results for users.

The metadata on the right describes a book in our collections. It includes information such as the date it was published, its title, authors, place of publication, and more.

Metadata is formally structured according to a set of rules called a "schema." This makes the data easy to understand, export, and subsequently manipulate and transform to extract stories and meaning from our collections.

When we have metadata in bulk like we do in our digital collections, the abundance of data provides the opportunity to visualize our collections in new ways. Numerous open-access and proprietary software exist to help manipulate and visualize data. (Check out  this list  from the University of North Carolina!)

This is where we begin our journey…

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) allow us to analyze and display location data. Using ArcGIS, a web-based mapping software, let’s see the origins of items in the Science History Institute's digital collections.

In the map below, click on a data point to see how many records come from that city. Then select "Browse Features" to look through the records. Select any specific item for a link to its record and an image of the object.

We have a basic idea of where nearly every item in the digital collections was created. However, our knowledge varies in specificity. In the map above, you can explore the collection objects for which we know the corresponding city of creation. Though we don't have city-specific data points for all digitized items, this offers a rough representation of the geographic distribution of our collections.

This map contains approximately 6,800 data points. As a history of science museum, our collections encompass various aspects of scientific change. Therefore, you could theoretically use this map to infer the loci of global hubs of scientific output. Realistically, however, this map reflects the Institute’s collecting priorities and is not necessarily a reliable image of where science has taken place in the world. We can see in this map biases in our collecting and digitization priorities and identify opportunities for improvement; more data points (i.e., more comprehensive digitization and collecting) would eventually lead to a more accurate representation of the geography of scientific output.

Comprehensively digitized and described collections are ideal for creating visualizations. For example, the Papers of Georg and Max Bredig is an archival collection that the Institute has fully digitized and described. The collection contains letters sent by members of the Bredig family: father Georg, son Max, daughter Marianne, and Marianne’s husband Viktor. Their correspondence reflects the family’s movements across Europe and the United States during a tumultuous and dangerous period in history.

Their spatial relationships also have a temporal dimension. Over time, Georg, Max, and Marianne travel as part of their educations, careers, and lives. Most significantly, the family eventually emigrates to the United States as their Jewish heritage threatens their lives during the rise of the Third Reich. Below we’ll explore the Bredigs' stories by mapping their correspondence during specific periods.

Distilling cultural objects into data results in an inherent loss of information and the genesis of something new altogether. Descriptive data about museum or library materials can be understood as an object of intellectual value in their own right, a discrete derivative of the original work.

David Berry summarizes in his work Understanding Digital Humanities (2012), “Information…necessarily has to be discarded in order to store a representation within the computer. In other words, a computer requires that everything is transformed from the continuous flow of everyday life into a grid of numbers that can be stored as a representation which can then be manipulated using algorithms. These subtractive methods of understanding culture produce new knowledges and methods for the control of memory and archives.”

Mapping is one way in which we can reconnect history and geography, but the age of digital technology has given rise to many new creative methods for conducting and presenting research and connecting with cultural objects and histories. Reimagine data as a tool to ignite humanist endeavors and to bridge the past and present. Data could be the vehicle for your own journey across time and space.