Hidden notes of the Hidden Figures

Awesome !

Via Isaac Calder.

More than 40 years before women gained the right to vote, women labored in the Harvard College Observatory as “computers” — astronomy’s version of NASA’s “Hidden Figures” mathematicians.

Between 1885 and 1927, the observatory employed about 80 women who studied glass plate photographs of the stars, many of whom made major discoveries. They found galaxies and nebulas and created methods to measure distance in space. In the late 1800s, they were famous: newspapers wrote about them and they published scientific papers under their own names, only to be virtually forgotten during the next century.

“We know there were at least 80 women who worked in this space on these glass plate photographs, which is a pretty amazing number considering women were still trying to get social approval to go to college, let alone work in the sciences,” Smith Zrull said.

In the Plate Stacks at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics — the modern version of what was once called the Harvard College Observatory — Smith Zrull oversees a digitization project to make the glass plates available to the world. Since 2005, a custom-built scanner has been making its way through the collection of more than half a million plates from 1885 to 1993. The team scans 400 plates per day — they’re at about the halfway point now — and Smith Zrull estimates about three years of scanning remains.

Last fall Smith Zrull turned her attention to about 30 notebooks in the plate stacks belonging to the women computers. Smith Zrull found 118 boxes, each containing between 20 and 30 books. Inside were more notebooks from the women computers and notebooks from astronomers who predated photography and made hand-drawn sketches of planets and the moon.

“People didn’t know they existed when they were in storage,” Smith Zrull says. “As different curators came and went here, I suppose people forgot they were there. Now that we know they exist, we can make them accessible to the public, they can be cataloged in a library so people can come across them.”

The library has completed transcription of about 200 volumes. Right now, notebooks from two women are listed on the Smithsonian Transcription Center website. There are many more to come — nearly 2,300 out of a total 2,500 books — but the work has begun. Bouquin hopes the public will help transcribe the books, but anticipates it will still be years before everything is readable.

“You’ll be able to do a full-text search of this research,” Bouquin says. “If you search for Williamina Fleming, you’re not going to just find a mention of her in a publication where she wasn’t the author of her work. You’re going to find her work.”


http://www.metafilter.com/169191/people-forgot-they-were-there
https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-07-27/team-women-are-unearthing-forgotten-legacy-harvard-s-women-computers