Review of Davy Notebooks Project, Editors: Sharon Ruston, Samantha Blickhan, Frank James, and Joanna Taylor

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, digital communication technologies gained new significance in our lives through their ability to restore and promote sociability in situations where physical meetings are not possible. The education sector was particularly affected by it and had to adapt rapidly, seeking innovative approaches to foster a sense of community and shared learning experiences online. However, the emergence of online learning communities and platforms is not an entirely new phenomenon confined to the past five years. For instance, Goodreads, launched in 2007, was aimed to connect readers to discover, share, and review books. Similarly, Duolingo, introduced in 2011, brings together language learners and is currently described in the Google Play Store as the world’s most downloaded educational app. In a more academic context, Zooniverse, launched in 2009, is a pioneer platform for online crowdsourced research, connecting volunteers and researchers from all around the globe, and it is the birthplace of the Davy Notebooks Project. Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829) is largely recognised as one of the most remarkable chemists of the nineteenth century. His enquiries and experiments led him to isolate more chemical elements than anyone before him and to invent the miners’ safety lamp. His accomplishments earned him a knighthood, a baronetcy, and the presidency of the Royal Society from 1820 to 1827. However, the term scientist as a professional identity was not coined until 1834. Hence, as Jan Golinsky suggests, understanding the life and character of Humphry Davy is not a straightforward task. It requires the modern researcher to avoid assuming that he was trying to conform to a social identity that did not yet exist and instead to pay close attention to his creative “self-fashioning” (Golinsky 9) process as a “man of science” (Golinsky 6). Davy’s notebooks reflect his heterogeneous interests and personality. In them, he wrote on a variety of topics, from the physiological effects of inhaling nitrous oxide, to geology, agriculture, his continental travels, or poetry. In his Life of Lord Byron, Thomas Moore observed that Davy’s “talents for literature were as remarkable as his empire over science” (Moore 166). However, the latter appears to have largely overshadowed his posthumous reputation as a poet. On its home page, Zooniverse presents itself as a practical response to the flood of information that researchers have access to in the twenty-first century and as a means to accelerate research through collaborative efforts. Whereas volunteers are not required to have specialised background to participate in their projects, having multiple people look at the data has proven to produce more accurate results, as has been the case regarding the transcription and annotation of Humphry Davy’s notebooks. As Sharon Rushton, the project’s principal investigator (PI), recently explained at the Lancaster Literature Festival, 13,121 pages from Humphry Davy’s notebooks and lecture notes have been transcribed through the combined effort of 3,841 volunteers from around the globe. The platform allowed each volunteer to examine a picture of an original page, where lines could be selected individually and transcribed into a text box. Each line would be transcribed by three different individuals and these answers would then be reviewed by the project team and subject to a consensus score, which would inform the final editorial decision. The nature of the project fostered a collaborative reading experience among the participants, who were encouraged to discuss the content of their transcriptions with each other and the project team on the discussion board that Zooniverse provides. These side discussions resulted in the creation of approximately four thousand explicatory notes that inform the text and shed new …