The Archimedes Project

The Archimedes Project will create a testbed for developing and exploring model interactive environments for the history of mechanics. It will also serve as a proof-of-concept project for open digital libraries for topics in the history of science designed to integrate research and knowledge dissemination in new ways.

The project is funded by the Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 2 program of the National Science Foundation and is a joint endeavor of

the Classics Department at Harvard University,
the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science ( MPIWG) in Berlin,
the English Department at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and
the Perseus Project at Tufts University.

It also engages a wider network of scholars supported in particular by the Programme International de Coopération Scientifique (PICS).
Numerous treatises on mechanics as well as other forms of documentation of mechanical knowledge and practices constitute the project corpus. Ongoing research at the MPIWG on the long-term development of mental models of mechanical thinking and their manifestation in technical terminologies, inferences of practitioners, engineers, and scientists plays an important role in the testbed design. The testbed also requires a 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 and Italian, and semantic linking of sources to general and technical, modern and historical dictionaries and reference works.