Hello everyone,
This is Sydney and Nico, Star Notes and Project PHaEDRA researchers. We hope you are all doing well and enjoying the summer! As always, thank you for remaining interested in our work and for volunteering your time to help with our research and learn about the history of women in astronomy, as well as preserve the research of the Harvard College Observatory.
We will be moving on to the second phase of Star Notes soon. As we reach the end of the notebooks that have plate numbers, we are grouping multiple astronomers into a single workflow. We also are including male astronomers who worked with the plates. The next phase of Star Notes will ask you to identify and describe anything that is ‘non-textual’ including astronomical sketches, graphs, and inserted material. Expect updates soon on when that workflow goes live!
Our current office hour series is “Behind the Scenes”! Thank you to everyone who attended our July office hours! We really appreciated your engagement with Sydney Coldren’s work on DASCH oral histories, and your interesting show-and-tell discoveries! Our next meeting will be on August 30th at 2PM ET. We will have the artist Erika Blumenfeld as a guest speaker, to tell us about how the photographic plates used by the astronomical women computers have inspired her stunning visual artwork, and how she preserves history in her pieces. You can register for the meeting here, and read about her work in this new National Geographic article!
Currently, the notebooks we are using for transcription of plate numbers for Star Notes belong to Davidovich, Takayanagi, Stein, Sanborn, and Hindimin. The notebooks we are currently transcribing on the Smithsonian Transcription Center belong to Williamina P. Fleming and Evelyn F. Leland.
If you’re a volunteer looking to get credit for your work on our project, please fill out this Google Form to receive a volunteer confirmation on Center for Astrophysics letterhead (you will need to sign in to a Google account to submit the form. If you don’t have a Google account, you can send an email to sydney.evans@cfa.harvard.edu). As always, if you have any questions for us, or if there’s anything that we can do to help, you can contact us or find us on the Talk boards. Have a great month!
Sydney and Nico
Star Notes Team
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
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- August 2023 Star Notes Update - August 15, 2023
- July 2023 Star Notes Update - July 18, 2023
- June Star Notes Update - May 23, 2023
