Archimedes Project

Archimedes Project

This is the homepage of the Archimedes Project at Harvard University.

The Archimedes Project aims to develop model interactive environments for scholarly research on the history of mechanics and engineering from antiquity to the Renaissance. It is designed to integrate research and knowledge dissemination in new ways and to serve as a proof-of-concept project for open digital libraries on topics in the history of science. The project is funded by the Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 2 program of the National Science Foundation and is a joint endeavor of the Department of the Classics at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, Germany. Numerous treatises on mechanics as well as other forms of documentation of mechanical knowledge and practices constitute the project corpus. Ongoing research at Harvard University and the MPIWG on the long-term development of mechanical knowledge and its manifestation in technical terminology and the inferences of practitioners, engineers, and scientists plays an important role in the testbed design. The project demands powerful, linguistically based information technology for handling the variety of languages occurring in the source materials. Source documents are being prepared with tools such as automatic morphological analysis of Latin, Greek, Italian, and Arabic, as well as the automatic linking of sources to modern and historical dictionaries and reference works.

Research tools on Euclid's Elements

Index of propositions with links to online manuscript images.
New technologies for the study of Euclid's Elements: paper by Mark Schiefsky including a description of Archimedes project technology and its application to the study of technical terminology and deductive structures in the Elements.

Project technology developed at Harvard

• Arboreal (content-based XML browser and annotation environment)
• Donatus (morphological analysis for XML texts)
  • lists of supplemental forms by language (also available as XML)
• Pollux (direct access to dictionaries)

Other tools

• ficus (automatic insertion of page image and figure attributes for Archimedes documents)
• Tools for the CDLI
  • The ATF to XTF converter is now hosted at UPenn
  • atf2www converter

For more information...

The Archimedes Project was featured in an article in the Harvard University Gazette (11-13-2003).
Read more about the project's goals, methods, and personnel.
Visit the main Archimedes Project web site (at MPIWG, Berlin).

Research notes

• Automatic (Information Processing) Approaches to Document Content in the Archimedes Project
• Support for Arabic Texts in the Archimedes Project
• The Challenge of the Humanities to the World Wide Web ()

Project documentation

• Archimedes Project Repository: Working Draft 4 ()
• The Arboreal Catalog System ()
• The Arboreal Docspecs System (; further resources)
• Archimedes Bundle Structure ()
• The Donatus XML-RPC Interface (Donatus version 1.9) ()