The Davy Notebooks Project
Authors: Bird Eleanor , James Frank , Wolf Alexis , Ruston Sharon , Lacey Andrew , Blickhan Samantha 
Published: August 2023

Notes and Records special issue roundtable

Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) was the foremost chemist of the early nineteenth century. He isolated more elements than any other individual has before or since, including calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium. He was the first person to inhale nitrous oxide, which subsequently become an important anaesthetic. His popular lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain brought him public fame. The miners’ safety lamp he invented, which became known as the ‘Davy lamp’, was used widely in mines in Britain and abroad. In 1820 he became President of the Royal Society. Davy is now well known as a bridging figure between the ‘two cultures’ of the arts and sciences.

Davy’s scientific processes can be seen in 75 extant notebooks held at the Royal Institution and Kresen Kernow in Redruth, Cornwall's new archive centre. These manuscripts record critical scientific experiments; drafts of important lectures and publications; geological drawings; character portraits of Davy’s eminent scientific contemporaries; to-do lists, shopping lists, and autobiographical notes; references to Davy’s reading and contain a great deal of poetry. Notebook pages — torn, stained, and burned — reveal that Davy wrote poetry in his laboratory while at his scientific work.

This event offers very short tasters of our special issue of the Notes and Records of the Royal Society will be the primary vehicle of disseminating the findings of our major AHRC-funded research project transcribing and annotating the complete set of Davy’s notebooks. The project brings together leading scholars in a number of fields: History of Science, English Literature, Colonialism and Empire, and Digital Humanities. The notebooks have never been transcribed in their entirety before and made publicly available. Connections will be made between these and Davy’s letters, lectures, published works, as well as his chemistry, geology, and other scientific interests, and his life and career.

Experiences of the volunteer transcribers

[The Davy Notebooks Project](wp.lancs.ac.uk/davynotebooks), which first launched as a pilot project in 2019, is a crowdsourced transcription project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Using Zooniverse, the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research, the project is gathering transcriptions of the foremost man of science of the early nineteenth century, Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829). The transcriptions of Davy's 75 strong notebook collection, produced with the help of our volunteer community, will soon be published and made freely available to all on the Lancaster Digital Collections platform.

In this event, held on Monday 24th July 2023, members of the Davy Notebooks team meet with some of our Zooniverse volunteer transcribers and ask them to reflect on their experiences of transcribing on the project and what they have got out of it! Five of our volunteers, Helen, Carrie, John, David and Carlene also present on their favourite page and discoveries, and we give a behind the scenes look at our digital edition of Davy’s notebooks on the Lancaster Digital Collections platform.

With thanks to our Zooniverse volunteer transcribers who attended this event:

Helen, Carrie, John, David, Carlene, Angela, Chloe

With Professor Sharon Ruston, Lancaster University, Dr Ellie Bird, Lancaster University, Professor Frank James, UCL, Dr Samantha Blickhan, Zooniverse, Dr Andrew Lacey, Lancaster University, Dr Alexis Wolf, Lancaster University.