The Newton Theological Papers Project: A Comprehensive Online Edition of Newton's Theological Papers

Isaac Newton is arguably the greatest mathematical physicist the world has witnessed, being the first discoverer of calculus, the heterogeneity of white light, and Universal Gravitation. However, he was a devout Christian and his first interest was his religious work. When he died in 1727, he left over 3 million words of theology, and over a million words of alchemy. His religious writings were deeply heretical, since at an early age he had come to believe that Jesus Christ was not part of a Holy Trinity. Because he would have become a social pariah, or even been imprisoned if his views had been made public, he kept virtually all of his writings in this area secret, and indeed the bulk of them (now housed in Jerusalem) only came to the attention of scholars in the 1960s.

The Newton Project was formed in 1998 and is currently based at the University of Sussex, working in partnership with other scholarly groups in the US, Canada, Europe and the UK. Its ambitious long term goal is to publish online everything that Newton ever wrote, along with whatever comments and commentaries on Newton and his work have been published in the last three hundred years. We believe that this is an appropriate monument to a unique individual whose accomplishments are of global significance.

At an early stage the project set out to publish Newton's theological writings in a pioneering online edition according to exacting scholarly standards. Without compromising the scholarly excellence of our work, the Web allows us to publish materials at a vastly faster rate, and at a greatly reduced expense compared to what is possible with printed works. Unlike printed editions, editors working online can aim to publish every little deletion or blot that Newton made on the page, revising any mistakes along the way. Accordingly, readers of these materials can see a 'diplomatic' transcription, which records all of Newton's marks on a page, or a 'normalised' version, which presents a cleaner version of the same text.

Only a small percentage of these texts had ever been seen by more than a handful of scholars before we started to publish them. However, with generous support from the AHRC, the project has already made over two million words of these writings freely available to a world wide audience. In this application, the Newton Project proposes to complete the online edition of Newton's religious writings by transcribing and publishing four major documents, currently housed in Jerusalem, Oxford and Geneva. We aim to complete the transcription of Newton's theological writings by the end of 2012. The magnitude of this achievement is indicated by the fact that once complete, they will represent the largest body of 'born digital' text by any individual.

The completion of the task will allow scholars and non-academic audiences to see the full range of Newton's astonishing theological works, and will allow researchers to tackle the difficult question of how different aspects of his work were related. Did Newton's theological work influence his scientific work, or vice versa? Is his theological work related in any way to his alchemical writings (now available online through the Chymistry of Isaac Newton site at the University of Indiana)? Or are they all separate and 'compartmentalised' activities?

However, strenuous efforts have been made by the Newton Project team to make the texts on the site as comprehensible and as accessible as possible to a non-academic audience. An easy to use interface and a 'tour' on the front page allow general readers to sample the most exciting elements of Newton's writings, including extraordinary information taken from his private notebooks. The project is especially interested in tailoring the site's contents to schools and university students.

The achievements of Isaac Newton are widely regarded as constituting the origins of modern physics. The founding of professional Newton scholarship in the 1950s, and to some extent the wider creation of the discipline of History and Philosophy of Science, relied on excellent printed editions of his mathematical and scientific papers. The readership of these materials was small, and the cost of each volume was extensive and prohibitive. The work of the Newton Project has matched and indeed surpassed the quality of these canonical works (at a fraction of the cost), because it can record all deletions and additions made by Newton and indeed can keep adding to the stock of materials until something like a full rendition of his available writings is achieved. All this is accomplished within an online medium allowing full searching and browsing facilities, with associated commentaries and introductions. Crucially, the project site is designed to be used by both academic and non-academic readers.

Newton's papers constitute heritage of global significance and the materials produced by the Newton Project are freely available to anyone with access to the Web. Nevertheless, although the digital medium allows us to reach audiences vastly greater than those in the world of print, the conceptual difficulty of the many of the materials available on the site presents serious problems of exposition and presentation. Thus the management of the project involves not merely issues of encoding and transcription, but also demands that the resource creators consider questions of design both from a purely technical point of view, but also with specific audiences in mind. This has required the creation of an evolving and integrated environment in which readers of different levels of aptitude and interest can find what they want easily and quickly and discover unexpected facts about Newton and his work.

Newton's work was often composed in Latin or Greek, and requires some historical training to understand it in its proper contexts. Moreover, it was considered to be technically forbidding even by his contemporaries, so serious thought has to be given over the extent to which it is possible to convey his ideas to a non-academic audience. In essence, the organisation of the site demands that it be made accessible and not merely available. Over the past two years we have made strenuous efforts to make the site more amenable to broader audiences, by adding state of the art browsing tools and over one million words of contemporary non-Newtonian texts and introductory essays. The site now has an introductory 'tour' on the front page that shows some of the most fascinating and quirky aspects of Newton, while also displaying excerpts from some of his more complex writings.

We have also argued strongly that it is important to actively engage with non-academic groups rather than to stick materials online and to hope for the best, and members of the project team are frequently involved in speaking to schools and promoting the resources. We were given a JISC award in 2008 ('Enlightening Science') that allowed us to investigate techniques for making our materials presentable and interesting to undergraduates and school students at Key Stages 3 and 4. With funding from a private donor we are going to pursue this initiative to the next stage, integrating a more multimedia aspect to the site that will involve podcasted commentaries and interviews with major historians, scientists and theologians.

The success of these innovations can be measured by the spectacular increase in the use of our resources over the last 30 months. The total request for pages rose from 1,195,418 in 2008 to 1,957,285 in 2009, and the total request for texts more than doubled from 451,087 to 928,788 in the same period. We believe we are exemplary in producing scholarship of th