Perseus Hosts the Robert Boyle Work Diaries

10 January 2002

Perseus is pleased to announce a new on-line edition of Robert Boyle's work-diaries. Boyle (1627-1691) was primarily a chemist, best known to science students for "Boyle's Law" about the relationship among temperature, pressure, and volume of gases.

Boyle's work-diaries span his entire career and cover many subjects besides chemistry: literature, medicine, and even philosophy. A general introduction provides orientation and further background.

Most of the diary entries are in English, but others are in Latin. The Perseus language tools, originally developed for classical studies, will help make the Latin diaries accessible to readers who may not know Latin very well.

Perseus is grateful to Dr. Charles Littleton of the Robert Boyle Project at the University of London for making these materials available to us. Because Dr. Littleton had encoded the diaries in XML using the TEI, a standard tag-set for the humanities, the texts were easily incorporated into the Perseus text system. More information on the encoding can be found in Dr. Littleton's description of the markup of the Boyle papers and in an article by Perseus staff about the text system. The editorial principles for this edition are also documented.

Please report any problems to the Perseus webmaster.