This summer Candace and I are going to Alcon2022 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
We’ll be presenting an update on The Sky Tonight project (skytonight.org; see overview).
The program and speaker line-up look exciting. It even includes an all-day trip to the Very Large Array!
Very Large Array and Astronomical Lyceum: website | Wikipedia
When our girls were young, Candace took the poem “The Swing” by Robert Louis Stevenson and gave it a catchy tune. They loved to be pushed in a swing as she sang the poem. Here’s the poem and her musical notation, which she wrote out last night.
The Land of Nod and Other Poems for Children by Robert Louis Stevenson,
selected and illustrated by Michael Hague
(New York: Henry Holt, 1998); Amazon.
The Sky Tonight: Perils of Launching a New Digital Scholarship Project.
A brief introduction of The Sky Tonight project prepared for the OU Libraries’ “UL Week” in late May, 2022.
Abstract:
We gaze at the night sky filtered through many layers of cultural heritage and representation. But how best to inspire people today to explore those cultural layers and tell their own sky stories today? Building on my experience as a former planetarium director, astronomy teacher, student of the history of astronomy, and curator of the History of Science Collections, I’ll share my hopes for “The Sky Tonight” digital scholarship project and explain how I’ve gone about creating the website so far. Was I crazy to select Drupal as the platform? What architecture would be basic enough to be robust but also scale to address the various kinds of resources I expect the site to provide? Is it reasonable to expect a single website to be able to support research and public outreach at the same time? Can a single site be crafted to appeal to an extremely wide range of disparate users and audiences? And how can it be implemented it in limited spare time, incrementally, and sustained by a humanities scholar over the long term?
Jubilation! Myrrh, 1975
I have this album in my hand, my turntable isn’t working, but here it is on YouTube (and Apple Music). Thanks, Marijohn, your “Where I’m Going” has traveled with me all these years! (2022 – 1975 = 43 years and counting) 😃
Posting it here for future easy reference:
On this page I’ll post Torrance updates as they happen for 2022. Here are some videos in reverse chronological order; a few other links or videos will be added later.
Cf. Torrance updates for 2021.
May 2022: Announcing The Thomas F. Torrance Science and Religion Collection, History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma. I expect to be devoting considerable sustained effort to this project in coming years.
Discussion with Calum MacKellar, The Image of God, Personhood and the Embryo (#2017-cmk-1), esp. pp. 133-137. Cf. Christianity and the New Eugenics: Should We Choose To Have Only Healthy Or Enhanced Children? (#2020-CMK-1). April 7, 2022.
Discussion with Chris Kaiser, “Humanity in an Intelligible Cosmos: Non-Duality in Albert Einstein and Thomas Torrance,” in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology: Theologians in Dialogue with T. F. Torrance (2001). February 10, 2022.
In the church calendar March 25 is the Feast of the Annunciation, the annual remembrance of Gabriel’s message to Mary according to the gospel of Luke 1:26-38.
Here’s a carol that tells the story from Moya Brennan’s wonderful Christmas album, An Irish Christmas:
“Gabriel’s Message,” by Moya Brennan, An Irish Christmas (2006)
I cannot think of this day without calling to mind the “shimmer of the angels’ wings” — “not a feather stirred” — in Fra Angelico’s painting from the Monastery of San Marco in Florence:
The Annunciation, by Fra Angelico (c. 1437)
Malcom Guite reflects upon the Annunciation in this poem, the first in a quintet on Mary, from his book Sounding the Seasons:
We see so little, stayed on surfaces,
We calculate the outsides of all things,
Preoccupied with our own purposes
We miss the shimmer of the angels’ wings,
They coruscate around us in their joy
A swirl of wheels and eyes and wings unfurled,
They guard the good we purpose to destroy,
A hidden blaze of glory in God’s world.
But on this day a young girl stopped to see
With open eyes and heart. She heard the voice;
The promise of His glory yet to be,
As time stood still for her to make a choice;
Gabriel knelt and not a feather stirred,
The Word himself was waiting on her word.
Listen to Malcolm read it aloud on his blog.
Candace and I have been reading aloud Steve Bell’s Pilgrim Year series. In the booklet on Lent, Steve writes:
“We typically think of Mary, and anything to do with the birth narrative of Jesus, as belonging to the seasons of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. However, echoes of Lent/Easter reverberate through the Christmas narrative just as echoes of Christmas sound through Lent. The story of salvation is one story where every part penetrates and deepens the meaning of the other… Now is the liturgical time to begin preparing for his coming into our lives… The Annunciation announces and inaugurates the Incarnation…” Steve Bell, Pilgrim Year, Lent, p. 56.
Steve Bell, “May It Be Done,” Feast of Seasons (1995)
St. Patrick’s prayer – the “breastplate” or “lorica”
Andrew Wright, “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” (Journeysongs)
1
I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.
I arise today
Through the strength of Christ’s birth with His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.
Steve Bell, “The Lorica”
2
I arise today
Through the strength of the love of cherubim,
In the obedience of angels,
In the service of archangels,
In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In the prayers of patriarchs,
In the predictions of prophets,
In the preaching of apostles,
In the faith of confessors,
In the innocence of holy virgins,
In the deeds of righteous men.
I arise today, through
The strength of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The radiance of the moon,
The splendor of fire,
The speed of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of the sea,
The stability of the earth,
The firmness of rock.
Daniel Couper, “This Day God Gives Me”
3
I arise today, through
God’s strength to pilot me,
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before me,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak for me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s shield to protect me,
God’s host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptation of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
afar and near.
I summon today
All these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel and merciless power
that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul;
Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me an abundance of reward.
Jean Watson, “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”
4
Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.
John Michael Talbot, “Christ my Light”
Previous posts on St. Patrick’s Day:
Bonus: Malcolm Guite on St. Patrick’s Day, 2021
Russell Moore asked what 12 books I would want with me if I were stranded on a deserted island for the rest of my life. I couldn’t do it. For me, 14 is the minimum! So here are my 12 + 2 stowaways in other baggage = 14 books, in no particular order.
PS: I hope the island is Scottish or Irish, like the island of Skellig Michael. If it’s tropical, just kill me now.
PPS: If one adds up the purchase price of the editions linked to via the pictures above, it will become clear why I’ve been left abandoned on the deserted island in the first place, banished from disrupting our monthly budget ever again. 😂
Appalachian Journey concert (YouTube, Amazon) / album (Wikipedia)
(See also Francis Collins and Renée Fleming here.)
I’m writing a short statement of the significance of Open Access for the OU History of Science Collections. It’s intended as a concise overview and introduction, not a detailed policy or white paper. This is my rough working sketch.
Communities of Collaboration
Open access has two dimensions: technological and cultural. Our aim in the History of Science Collections is to pursue open access as a means of establishing communities of collaboration. These communities freely range across demographic and disciplinary lines. The challenge of fostering communities of collaboration is what defines the modern university library, including special collections. Conceived in this way, the open sharing of ideas is a cultural task that requires more than just a merely technological approach, although the technological infrastructure of open access is a prerequisite. Without a humane approach to technology that attends to the needs of various communities and appreciates the nature of their work, the communities of collaboration we seek to support will not actually flourish.
Unexpected partners
As a special collection we strive to provide technological infrastructure in the specific ways that collaboration requires, developed in dialogue with research partners and with attentiveness to other creative users of collections materials. We cannot anticipate a priori who these users might be or what kinds of communities of collaboration may result.
For us, one actual need we discerned and determined to provide is open-access high-resolution images. When I began working for the libraries in June 2000, image requests came in immediately. Even my first month on the job made clear to me that resourceful researchers, artists, and lay persons in unexpected pursuits could put images from our books to so many creative purposes. Over the first few years we received image requests not only from historians of science and scientists (whom one would expect), but also from K12 schools and educators, artists, from organizers of conferences for event programs, from restaurants for use in their decor, and even from churches for use in bulletins! From that time, I made it our goal to make providing open-access print-quality images a distinctive service of the OU History of Science Collections.
So with help from volunteers(*), we began creating a website of online galleries populated with images in high demand by scientists, educators, and researchers. By 2009 or so, we had roughly 60,000 images online available for download for free in print-quality resolution. With systematic digitization of entire books mostly beyond our means, we selected for digitization images most commonly found in survey textbooks with which science students and science educators would be most familiar.
Eventually OU Legal advised us that, while we might continue allowing direct downloads, the images must be copyrighted, and the question of their continued availability always seemed precarious. Thankfully, however, after Rick Luce became Dean of Libraries in 2014, OU Legal reversed themselves and approved a blanket policy of open access applied to all of our images. This open access policy remains in effect today for the History of Science materials in the new repository (repository.ou.edu). The old online galleries are now deprecated and no longer available on the open internet, and sadly, our current repository does not support direct downloads of print-quality images. Nevertheless, the service of providing open access images appropriately reflects our home within a public research university library.
Visibility of the Collections and awareness of materials
In addition to serving users in ways that support multiple communities of collaboration, the provision of high quality images without cost (and without delays due to time-consuming human mediation) was also (while it lasted) an advertising and promotional strategy that money couldn’t buy. Open access increases the visibility of a special collection located obscurely in a flyover state and allows us to achieve an international reach. Until the online galleries were deprecated, we developed a fairly successful strategy of using open-access print-quality images to increase our visibility in the profession of the history of science and also among science educators, journalists, and publishers.
The distinctiveness of an open access policy for high quality images immediately became clear to me back in 2000 when a PBS documentary on Galileo began production that would eventually list us as the first institutional credit. As another example, in the first decade of the 2000’s we frequently saw our images appear in the pages of Sky and Telescope, which was at that time the most popular monthly periodical for amateur astronomy. Or fast forward to 2011 when the most important book on Copernicus to be published in a generation included this sentence in the preface:
“I wish to register special thanks to the University of Oklahoma History of Science Collections for its enlightened policy of making available free online use of visual material from its rich collections of rare primary sources.”
Providing high-quality select images at no cost increased awareness among many communities and readerships that a History of Science Collections exists in Oklahoma.
While we are unfortunately no longer in the business of supporting unmediated direct downloads of print-quality images, there are other ways we have been able to use open access to increase awareness of materials. For example, via the ShareOK repository, documents such as the critical edition of the most important medieval treatise on the astrolabe, or the annual newsletters of the International Commission for the History of the Geosciences (INHIGEO), now draw attention to OU from global communities distributed far and wide. The INHIGEO newsletters were discovered and cited by the writers of an obituary of Ursula Marvin for the New York Times. Marvin was a pioneering woman geologist who had been interviewed in the one of the newsletters by Kenneth L. Taylor. The discoverability features of ShareOK made those newsletters visible to writers who would never have thought to look for that information in Oklahoma.
Research collaborations
Open access is the basis for collaborations with partners in research. Consider, for example, Darwin Online and Galileotheca, the two digital libraries which support research on these major figures. The History of Science Collections is a major contributor to Cambridge University’s Darwin Online. Having provided digital versions of nearly 40 obscure editions, the Collections’ contribution is second only to that of Cambridge itself. Similarly, the Collections provided many works related to Galileo to the Museo Galileo in Florence, the leading research center for Galileo studies. For example, the OU copy of the broadsheet Apiarium, the first publication of observations made with a microscope, is one of only a handful of copies that exist. When Rick Luce and I visited the Museo Galileo for the first time, we presented the Director Paolo Gallucci with a 2GB scan. We were gratified when, a year later, Prof. Gallucci unveiled the Galileotheca digital library in an academic symposium held on the Norman campus as part of the Galileo’s World exhibit. These two international partnerships would be impossible without a policy of open access for high quality images.
Moreover, when Rick Luce arrived in 2014, the very first month on the job he visited Berlin to open a collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. With Jürgen Renn, the Director of the Max Planck, Luce agreed to co-develop an open access academic series of primary source editions. Edition Open Sources (EOS) resulted: a peer-reviewed, scholarly publishing series in both digital and physical formats. Digital-format publications in EOS are free and immediately accessible to the public worldwide under a creative commons license. Development of the platform was led by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (MPI). Francesco Luzzini’s Theory, Practice, and Nature In-between: Antonio Vallisneri’s Primi Itineris Specimen, the first title published under the editorial supervision of OU, was published in March of 2018. More recently, Mahdi Abdeljaouad and Jeffrey Oaks published Al-Hawārī’s Essential Commentary: Arabic Arithmetic in the Fourteenth Century November 24, 2021, the 14th title in the series overall. The project was a collaborative venture between MPI and the Department of the History of Science, OU Libraries, and the History of Science Collections. Although we do not expect to continue in an editorial role, the History of Science Collections will continue to supply open access works which scholars may wish to publish in the series.
These three examples — Darwin Online, Galileotheca, and Edition Open Sources — show that open access in support of communities of collaboration has an international reach.
* Two volunteers deserve particular mention: Eric Bruning and Carilyn Livesey. Eric — then an OU student in meteorology and now professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas Tech — generously created an online image gallery for us in python. Carilyn spent weeks at a time with our digital camera to create thousands of high resolution images selected from textbooks in science and the history of science.
Why open access matters — the following 6-minute video is an excerpt from a longer interview with Rob Reynolds, recorded at the NextThought studio on May 20, 2015. Thanks, Rob!
Kerry Magruder and Rob Reynolds – Open Access from Kerry Magruder on Vimeo.
“The defining challenge for a research university is how to establish these communities of collaboration that work across disciplinary lines.”
