{projects}

Project PHaEDRA

Handwritten notebook page by Henrietta S. Leavitt showing measures of comparison stars for the Small Magellanic Cloud, 1906 click to enlarge

Project PHaEDRA (Preserving Harvard’s Early Data and Research in Astronomy) is an initiative to catalog, digitize, transcribe, and enrich the metadata of over 2,500 logbooks and notebooks produced by Women Astronomical Computers and other early astronomers at the Harvard College Observatory. The goal is to ensure that this remarkable set of items, created by a remarkable group of people, is as accessible and useful as possible.

I initiated and led the project from 2016 until 2023 within the Wolbach Library, in collaboration with Harvard Plate Stacks and many other partners. When the Wolbach Library was closed in 2024, the Plate Stacks inherited the project and continue to carry it forward.

I secured digitization and preservation resources from the Harvard University Library and Weissman Preservation Center, along with $281,740 from the Smithsonian Women’s Committee and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative.

PHaEDRA Full-Text

Working with the Smithsonian Transcription Center’s Digital Volunteers program, PHaEDRA crowdsources transcriptions of the notebooks. Transcribed notebooks become full-text searchable on the NASA Astrophysics Data System.

Star Notes

Through the Zooniverse platform, Star Notes locates astronomical sketches, graphs, and other non-textual items in the notebooks. Phase 1 (identifying plate numbers) concluded in August 2022 and is being used to build a bridge to the original source material: over 500,000 glass plates.

Image: Leavitt, H. S. (1906). Measures of Comparison Stars. Small Magellanic Cloud. Project PHAEDRA: Preserving Harvard's Early Data and Research in Astronomy. Harvard College Observatory observations, logs, instrument readings, and calculations. Sequence volume 19, p. 2527. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1906phae.proj.2527L. Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System.