Darwin Manuscripts Project (Web Resource)
Title: Darwin Manuscripts Project
Author: David Kohn, Editor
Abstract: The Darwin Manuscripts Project is a historical and textual edition of Charles Darwin's scientific manuscripts. Digital access to Charles Darwin's work includes over 96,000 pages of Darwin's scientific manuscripts as high-resolution digital images, nearly 10,000 of which have been transcribed and are publicly accessible. The aim of the Darwin Manuscript Project is to produce professional quality scholarly editions of Darwin's manuscripts. The project provides high-quality scanned images of Darwin's manuscripts and transcriptions indicating physical qualities of the text and instruments Darwin used to create them. The transcriptions also show the layering effect created by Darwin's revisions of his manuscripts (e.g. what he crossed out, wrote between lines, marginal notes, lettering and numbering intended to organize his manuscripts). Through these revisions the reader can reconstruct the history of a manuscript's creation by Darwin.
Year: 2005
Primary URL: http://https://www.amnh.org/research/darwin-manuscripts
Primary URL Description: Charles Darwin's surviving scientific manuscripts—his original notes, notebooks, and drafts—contain the crucial documentary evidence for the birth and maturation of his theory of evolution by means of natural selection. The Darwin Manuscripts Project (DMP) site offers digital access to the folios that deal directly with the theory of evolution, and contains Darwin’s botany and zoology manuscripts and embraces all those on human evolution. The site focuses on the surviving record of Darwin's life work as a practicing scientist. It is intended to be accessible to all who want to trace Darwin’s intellectual development as a theorist, observer, and experimenter. The key to understanding this science-focused collection is to realize that Darwin organized his rough manuscripts into large thematic portfolios. It was from these amassed materials that he shaped his published work, which include On the Origin of Species and fifteen other books.

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