Darwin Online is the worlds largest and most widely used resource on Darwin, as said by its chief editor, John Van Wyhe. Van Wyhe is a historian of science, whose work has mainly focused on Charles Darwin and his “runner up” on the theory of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace.

Van Wyhe’s Darwin Online is not a collection of his writings on Darwin. Instead, his website mainly functions as a connector or a digital network linking between the many primary and secondary sources on Darwin. Here users can find original works of Darwin in transcribed PDF form, original images of the handwritten text, and many more assets. The PDFs are accessible in multiple languages, making the site available to a much wider audience. The non-primary information on Darwin conveys other interesting knowledge about his life. For example on the sites media tab, interesting links can be found on the scientist’s background, including a timeline telling the story of Darwin’s life. This page also links to what seems to be every news bite ever written about the man. Here one can find new articles, academic writings, and radio shows. One interesting page I saw under the media tab, displayed primary and secondary sources on “Darwin and Religion.” This is something I would think to be uncommon in sites on Darwin. Although Darwin did write on theology, it was obviously not the primary focus of his work. The vast amount of knowledge on Darwin’s life in all aspects shows how this resource is indeed the best digital source for researching the man. I found it interesting how Van Wyhe, with his vast knowledge, could have written a book about Darwin. It could have included his summary of every aspect contained in the site. However Van Wyhe chose not to, and I find his work more productive. If one is researching for any reason, you can begin with the brief biography, view the timeline of his life, and quickly browse over all the titles he worked on. Before I start to research a topic in depth, I always begin by quickly reading over Wikipedia and I try to find some digital media on the subject. This way I can quickly get my head around the subject, and begin to form my outline. After a proper outline is formed I begin to start reading in depth. This layout of Van Wyhe’s site optimizes for quick learning by holding this structure. I think this point exposes what the most important aspect of digital history, that the structure of information can be much more dynamic. Dynamic structures can present and organize information in ways that will help you learn the best. In the Case of Darwin Online, I believe Van Wyhe did a good job organizing the information. The only suggestion I would make to his site is the somewhat outdated graphics and fonts, which do not exactly match current trends.

John Van Wyhe is a British historian based in Singapore that was founder and director of the world renowned Digital Darwin project. We had the opportunity to talk to him over Skype at 7am Singapore time, 7pm Colby time about his project and some of the stories, advice and lessons he learned from digitizing a database of hundreds of thousands of documents and other media forms. Before our talk, I only knew the basics of what his project was and what he wanted to accomplish by doing it, but being able to ask him questions and pick his brain allowed me to gain a real comprehension of what it would’ve been like to compile a database as large as the Digital Darwin project. I thought the scope and scale of the task he set out to complete was the most impressive, and it sought out to change the ownership of this information by opening it up to the world.

One aspect of the project that I hadn’t really thought of before was the copyright and ownership issues. I found the difficulty that he had to get the rights to use much of the work he needed quite interesting. Every document may have different ownership rights, and that needs to be factored in to the scope of the project as it can become very time consuming to obtain the rights to all the documents you may need for a project. I also really liked the simple objective of the Digital Darwin project, to make as much information about Darwin digitally available online as possible. It is one of the websites that makes the internet a better place for learning and sharing, how it was originally intended to, instead of arguably what it has become today.

Overall, I really enjoyed talking with Professor Van Wyhe and I learned a lot about how one would go about compiling and managing a project of such a large magnitude. Some of his lessons and guidance can definitely be applied into our projects for our class.

Sam Pratico

The Digital Darwin Event was extremely inspiring, especially after being able to put a face and personality to such a momentous project. The project itself was jaw dropping. There are large collections of writings from and about different thinkers, but the ability to access such a scope with the ease of your computer is unprecedented. Additionally, if I were to use this in an academic work, it is extremely helpful to be able to keyword search the documents themselves, and than to be able to search within the document and easily copy and paste quotes to be used in a paper. However, you can also experience some of the more physical elements that contribute to the story behind the work. The documents are scanned so you can see the paper, the wearing, the handwriting and actual drawings from Darwin himself. All of these things bring Darwin to life in ways that a student researching from their computer couldn’t typically experience, hopefully inspiring more excitement around the research. Additionally, the scope itself opens up new areas of study for many, who couldn’t traditionally find so many related documents surrounding a more niche field of study. Hopefully this project has, and continues to make this impact on academics and enthusiasts everywhere, as well as inspiring other similar projects on other fields or writers.

I thought the founder of the project himself to be extremely personable. He was excited to talk to us and took the time out of his day early in the morning, answered all our questions and seemed genuinely enthusiastic about helping us learn about this project. It was exciting putting a friendly face to such an impressive project. It made digital history projects seem more accessible, fun and exciting. As someone passionate about mtn biking, learning about his hobby as an avid and talented mountain biker definitely made the whole project and field of study seem that much “cooler”.

I thought the story of the projects beginnings were very exciting, sort of like an academic startup story. It is the type of thing that took lots of fundraising, bootstrapping and grit, just like a small business. Once established it started gaining more and more resources, materials and support, leading to exponential growth through the network effect. It has had to challenge intellectual property and plagiarism issues just like a startup and ended up being able to run itself off of people’s financial support just like a business. I thought this process showed how academia can be just as exciting as the business world, and the mountain biking professor definitely put a cool face to this story.

Overall I left the meeting feeling inspired going into my own project. I saw the value of digitizing existing archives and making them accessible. I was better able to understand how making something accessible directly leads to more research into a subject and more creative historical projects surrounding the topic. I can’t wait to visit the archives that my project focuses on and hopefully digitize and increase the access to some of these documents.

It has been over a century since the HMS Beagle, carrying a 22-year-old Charles Darwin, sailed around the world for 5 years studying foreign species. Darwin was famous for his work studying finches in the Galapagos and produced one of the most monumental books in the field of biology – The Origin of Species. To this day, Darwin’s work remains referenced by the academics and scholars in the field, but how does his work affect the average college student? More broadly, how does the lack of accessibility to Darwin’s work, both physically and intellectually, affect the ordinary student’s understanding of the Darwin’s research?

This leads to Darwin Online, one of the largest and most widely consulted anthologies of Charles Darwin’s publications ever produced. In my experience, Darwin Online has removed the barrier to information pertaining to Darwin and made it easier to gain a holistic understanding of the man himself. In layman’s terms, the online anthology has not only quelled my academic pursuits but also contained outside publications about the subject matter. Furthermore, the online collection includes materials that I may not have been privy to otherwise, as the website also contains some of Darwin’s private papers.

Additionally, Darwin Online attempts to allow individuals of all backgrounds equitable access to the information. With all that being said, the online collection has inherent limitations. People need wireless internet and a computer capable of connecting, but in many other ways, it removes the barriers to access. While browsing online, I noticed that the website also has translations for scholars and people to read in their native languages. This allows people to step out of the eurocentric lens and removes the language barrier that may have traditionally limited the opportunity to study these materials.

Darwin Online also ensures that the material is fully formatted for modern viewing. The entirety of Darwin’s works, including new discoveries, are constantly being scanned and uploaded to the web in the most widely accessible format. I mean everything. The website itself claims that “each text is absolutely complete, nothing is omitted (as so often with online texts) including end pages and publishers’ [advertisements].” This unadulterated version of Darwin’s works assists greatly when attempting to write research papers, editorials, and other publications because it removes the influence that another writer might have on the works.

Conclusively, Darwin Online is a tool that removes the inequities form studying the works of Darwin and allows everyone the chance to examine the original manuscripts, papers, and sketches otherwise inaccessible through traditional means.