I have become obsessed with the town of Arequipa Peru in the 1920s.
In March 2025, I began volunteering with Project PHaEDRA, a program of Harvard and the Smithsonian Institution to "catalog, digitize, transcribe, and enrich the metadata of over 2500 logbooks and notebooks" made by women astronomers working for the Harvard Observatory between 1881 and the 1950s. The women, selected on the basis of their education and amount of leisure time, worked alongside the professional male astronomers, for about half the pay, conducting research into the workings of the stellar universe, variable stars, meteors, planets, among others, and their notebooks are chockablock with data and commentary by these amazing women. The notebooks have been scanned, but they can't be transcribed to digital text with OCD — the journals are written by hand and often contain mathematical expressions and tables of numbers. So, they have a volunteer program to select others, including people like me, educated women with leisure time, to convert these documents to searchable text.
What the heck? I'm retired, I have some spare time, so I guilelessly began with some pretty mundane sets of data. At first I played around with how to format an appropriate page (the process of transcription is not all that different, in fact much simpler, than what it takes to format this page in the wiki). But I soon became fascinated with the women. I was working with the notebooks of Annie Jump Cannon, and I grew to quickly recognize her handwriting and soon was translating her comments as if she was talking to me. I soon realized that she was working and observing in the observatory at Harvard, something I had thought was restricted to men, and as I got to know her, I admired her abilities in math and physics. I was enthralled. And then it got worse.
I took on pages from the "Guest Book" and discovered that she had had visiting astronomers from all over the US and the world: Australia, China, Palestine, Canada, Europe, Africa, as well as clergy, social workers, and students. Albert Einstein was among them, as was Learned Hand. And then, for snicks and giggles, I took on pages that were lists of lantern slides from talks that Miss Cannon (as she was known) and others gave to local societies and formal astronomical groups. There I discovered that in 1922 she had traveled on business to Peru, specifically Arequipa Peru, in 1922. That was peculiarly interesting.
In March 2025, I began volunteering with Project PHaEDRA, a program of Harvard and the Smithsonian Institution to "catalog, digitize, transcribe, and enrich the metadata of over 2500 logbooks and notebooks" made by women astronomers working for the Harvard Observatory between 1881 and the 1950s. The women, selected on the basis of their education and amount of leisure time, worked alongside the professional male astronomers, for about half the pay, conducting research into the workings of the stellar universe, variable stars, meteors, planets, among others, and their notebooks are chockablock with data and commentary by these amazing women. The notebooks have been scanned, but they can't be transcribed to digital text with OCD — the journals are written by hand and often contain mathematical expressions and tables of numbers. So, they have a volunteer program to select others, including people like me, educated women with leisure time, to convert these documents to searchable text.
What the heck? I'm retired, I have some spare time, so I guilelessly began with some pretty mundane sets of data. At first I played around with how to format an appropriate page (the process of transcription is not all that different, in fact much simpler, than what it takes to format this page in the wiki). But I soon became fascinated with the women. I was working with the notebooks of Annie Jump Cannon, and I grew to quickly recognize her handwriting and soon was translating her comments as if she was talking to me. I soon realized that she was working and observing in the observatory at Harvard, something I had thought was restricted to men, and as I got to know her, I admired her abilities in math and physics. I was enthralled. And then it got worse.
I took on pages from the "Guest Book" and discovered that she had had visiting astronomers from all over the US and the world: Australia, China, Palestine, Canada, Europe, Africa, as well as clergy, social workers, and students. Albert Einstein was among them, as was Learned Hand. And then, for snicks and giggles, I took on pages that were lists of lantern slides from talks that Miss Cannon (as she was known) and others gave to local societies and formal astronomical groups. There I discovered that in 1922 she had traveled on business to Peru, specifically Arequipa Peru, in 1922. That was peculiarly interesting.