{"id":3419,"date":"2019-03-05T12:42:16","date_gmt":"2019-03-05T17:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/?p=3419"},"modified":"2019-03-05T12:42:16","modified_gmt":"2019-03-05T17:42:16","slug":"digital-darwinism-dr-wyhe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/2019\/03\/05\/digital-darwinism-dr-wyhe\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Darwinism & Dr. Wyhe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Digital Darwinism is an online database that has compiled all of Darwins writings together into one space.\u00a0 <\/span>Believed to be the largest online database of any single writer.\u00a0 <\/span>The project was started by Dr John van Wyhe, who is now a historian of science at the Department of Biological Sciences at Tembusu College, National University of Singapore.\u00a0 Van Wyhe has an M.A. from University College London and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>He then later moved on to Singapore where he found Darwin Online. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The project itself was a large task right from the beginning.\u00a0 <\/span>Dr. Wyhe created a team that consisted of programmers and historians to combine all the works that Darwin created into one online platform.\u00a0 <\/span>At the time it was very new, and cutting edge technology to learn how to program and make products on your own.\u00a0 <\/span>Dealing with hundreds of works from Darwin\u2019s life time they had to make digital copies of all these works.\u00a0 <\/span>That was either taking the actual texts and recreating a digital version of it, or uploading actual photos of the works.\u00a0 <\/span>Each of these were then stored in a Jsquel database using php, javascript and html. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dr. Wyhe believed that the most challenging part to the whole project was actually collecting Darwins writings.\u00a0 <\/span>At the time he said most of the institutions he was going reaching out to were relatively helpful with providing the work so he could make these digital copies. However, writings and articles that were kept in museums etc.. were much more difficult to receive the grace to make copies of Darwin pieces that didn\u2019t exist anywhere else.\u00a0 <\/span>In most cases he was able to convince and make it happen.\u00a0 <\/span>He noted that if this project was to be carried out in the present day, he believed that it would not have been possible.\u00a0 <\/span>Institutions that have thousands of articles, notes and essays from historic figures would not be willing to give their original copies away. They would rather create their own database for their own creditability as an institutions. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Having all of Darwins work categorized and located in one spot allows for his work to be seen and studied much easier.\u00a0 <\/span>Before internet and projects such as this only scholars had the ability to really study Darwin and his work.\u00a0 <\/span>Now any person with access to the internet, or even a library computer can research his work.\u00a0 <\/span>It has accelerated the study of Darwinism and arguable has made his immortality stronger than ever.\u00a0 <\/span>However, are we sure that Darwin wanted his work to be filtered through by key word searches to find quotes and snippets without having to actually read his work in its entirety.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Digital Darwinism is an online database that has compiled all of Darwins writings together into one space.\u00a0 Believed to be the largest online database of any single writer.\u00a0 The project was started by Dr John van Wyhe, who is now a historian of science at the Department of Biological Sciences at Tembusu College, National University […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8318,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[402584],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3419"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8318"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3419"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3420,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3419\/revisions\/3420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}