Computers used to be human. Many of those humans were women. The goal of Project PHaEDRA (Preserving Harvard’s Early Data and Research in Astronomy) is to transcribe and classify the contents of notebooks belonging to the human computers Harvard hired to catalog stars, identify variables, and interpret stellar spectra. Who are the transcribers? Folks just like you. Project PHaDRA is a citizen science program.
In this presentation the Project PHaEDRA team will describe the history that drives the project in greater detail, the lives of the women themselves, and the incredible value of their work, which has for too long been unrecognized. They will also tell you how you can get involved with the two citizen science projects, and how those efforts are helping us to make this trove of information more available and accessible!”
PHaEDRA is an initiative by the Wolbach Library, in collaboration with many partners, to catalog, digitize, transcribe, and enrich the metadata of over 2500 logbooks and notebooks produced by Women Astronomical Computers and other early astronomers at the Harvard College Observatory. Our goal is to ensure that this remarkable set of items, created by a remarkable group of people, is as accessible and useful as possible.