project description

1. The institutional context of the Humboldt Project
2. The scholarly context of the Humboldt Project
3. Sources included in the Humboldt Project

1. The institutional context of the Humboldt Project

The Humboldt Project aims at an open digital library dealing with a core aspect of the history of science: the role that scientific expeditions played in the discovery of the world. It is concerned with the central documents resulting from European expeditions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whose investigations focused on the Canarian Archipelago. The name Alexander von Humboldt (1769 - 1859) is intimately linked to this tradition.
The project has been initiated in April 2002 by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin and the Fundación Canaria Orotava de Historia de la Ciencia (FCOHC) in Tenerife. Their cooperation aims to combine interdisciplinary investigation and dissemination using new electronic media.
The project was made viable by the generous patronage of the following institutions:

Consejería de Educación, Cultura y Deportes del Gobierno Autónomo de Canarias
Cabildo Insular de Tenerife, Consejería de Educación, Cultura y Deportes
Cabildo de Gran Canaria, Consejería de Educación y Universidad
Ayuntamiento de La Orotava

and by the kind cooperation of the libraries, museums and institutions who provide documents or plant collections for digitisation

Biblioteca di Scienze. Università degli Studi di Firenze
Biblioteca Municipal de la Villa de La Orotava
Ibero-American Institute. Prussian Heritage Foundation
Jardín de Aclimatación de la Orotava
Le Musée Vert du Mans
Library of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Museo di Storia Naturale dell'Università di Firenze
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
The Botanical Museum and Library, University of Copenhagen
University of La Laguna
University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Universitätsbibliothek der Freie Universität Berlin

2. The scholarly context of the Humboldt Project

Up until the great voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the physical space in which the mind and imagination of the antique and medieval cultures moved was barely a stretch of land between India and Hispania, central Europe and the Sahara desert. Over a period of more than three centuries, our culture went from a static way of understanding the order of nature to one more dynamic and creative. One of the real motors of this knowledge transformation can be found in the scientific expeditions.
The sixteenth century was a time when adventurous sailors made huge efforts to discover unknown places. Due to the unreliability of navigation maps and instruments to correctly determine the longitude, they often embarked on their expeditions blindly. Later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, systematic work was carried out to set, chart, and catalogue the territories and habitats they discovered.
The expeditions of great scientific explorers such as Bougainville, Cook, La Pérouse, d’Entrecasteux, Labillardière, Baudin, Flinders, Kotzebue, Freycinet, Duperrey, Dumont d’Urville, Beechey, Fitzroy and Darwin are commonly cited whereas the myriads of short-term expeditions often remain neglected. Although these lacked the spectacular and emblematic character of the former, they were, on many occasions, much more productive. In fact, the discovery and consequent study of the historical, geographical and natural habitat of the Canary Islands is due not so much to the celebrated expeditions but to those less well-known, although both converged on the Archipelago at more or less the same time. The project therefore aims to give due attention to these peripheral expeditions.The richness and variety of the historical and scientific materials resulting from the great quantity of expeditions makes it possible to address a diversity of scholarly focal points, for example:

the zero meridian of the island of Hierro, the search for solutions to the problem of longitude; the correct position of the Islands; their cartography; and the exact calculation of the height of Peak Teide on Tenerife,
the categorization and cataloguing of the fauna and flora of the Archipelago,
its volcanic geological origins, and the initial development of Geology as a science,
temperature and climate as a health resource,
the initial use of Las Cañadas del Teide as a privileged astronomical observatory.

The digital archive planned by the project will also feature a significant number of images and illustrations.

3. Sources included in the Humboldt Project

In order to achieve the proposed aims, a vast number of historical sources must be digitised. This will enable a general comprehension of the development of the different fields of knowledge opened up by the scientific expeditions to the Canaries.
These sources comprise images as well as documents written in various languages- mostly French, English and German, which were edited throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The production line of the project will also include the development of a series of databases including bibliographic information, images, and expeditions.