Letter from François Arago to Thomas Young. Courtesy of the Royal Society

ƐPSILON is both a research consortium and a developing, flexible,technical infrastructure for recreating the network of practitioners who expanded scientific knowledge in the long nineteenth century. It will promote and support the digital creation, delivery, and preservation of scientific correspondence. Designed to link letter-texts from multiple sources for cross-searching and analysis, Epsilon will open up c19th science letters to the next generation of researchers and the widest possible public audience.

ƐPSILON is being designed to:

• Maintain the independent identity of ongoing projects
• Recognise the right of the originator to be identified
• Accept material in multiple formats
• Offer different levels of controlled access

And to take texts, metadata, and images from:

• Completed and ongoing born-digital projects
• Orphaned digital projects
• Print only projects, completed, in progress, in and out of copyright
• Print and digital projects in various formats
• Ebook publications
• Individual digital transcriptions of letters created by scholars
• Crowd-sourced transcription from digitised images

About ƐPSILON

Project website
https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/Epsilon

Project team
Dr Alison Pearn, Co-ordinator
Dr Michael Hawkins, Technical director

Research phases

Funders
Darwin Correspondence Project
Cambridge University Library

Partners
Cambridge Digital Library
The Darwin Correspondence Project
The John Stevens Henslow Project
The Joseph Dalton Hooker Correspondence Project at Kew
The Correspondence of Michael Faraday
The Correspondence of John Tyndall

DH themes
Text encoding
Digital editions