In this 200th anniversary year of the birth of Charles Darwin, and 150th anniversary year of the publication of his most famous (and one of science’s and history’s most famous) books, it is well worth a look at the amazing Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.
The web site was the idea of a science historian, John van Wyhe, from the University of Cambridge, UK, who realized that the works of Darwin that were already on the web were scattered across different web sites with no obvious editorial standards. Many institutions and individuals have contributed to the project, which started in 2002. So far, over 50,000 searchable text pages and 40,000 images have been uploaded, making the web site the most comprehensive bibliography of Darwin’s work ever published.
The repository contains all of Darwin’s books, publications and manuscripts, as well as ‘ancillary works’ — a collection of reviews describing the naturalist’s work, original documents, drawings, audio files and unpublished material, such as the notes that Darwin took on the ship the Beagle during his famous journey around the globe.
The end-of-year shows are always great fun but there is never enough time to highlight all the ‘Science Sensation‘ and ‘Science Silly Sausage‘ stories that I would like to talk about. So, I’ll take the opportunity to do that here!
