A little extra help on the Wallace Correspondence Project

Last week, I bade farewell to 9 Harvard students who had spent the last two weeks hard at work transcribing letters for the Wallace Correspondence Project. Their time at the Museum is part of a wider summer programme of study they undertake, which sees them head to Oxford to take the course “An exploration of evolutionary biology at Oxford University” (http://www.summer.harvard.edu/abroad/oxford/ ),
which is led Andrew Berry, Lecturer on Organismic and Evolutionary Biology lecturer at Harvard and Wallace historian.

The Harvard undergraduates (Rayhnuma Ahmed, Rabiya Ather, John Campbell, William Clerx, Emma Kowal, Luke Sundquist, Collin Vanostran, Sophia Watkins and Jenny Wong) were based in the NHM Reading Room and were transcribing some important letters from Wallace to Darwin as well as letters Wallace wrote to some of the great nineteenth figureheads of science, including Thomas Henry Huxley and Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker. 

                                          This year's Harvard students with the Alfred Russel Wallace portrait in the Cocoon at the Natural History Museum


Between them they produced 167 transcriptions, which is a great help to the project. These transcriptions will be available to everyone once the Wallace Correspondence Project online database is launched later this year.

On behalf of the WCP team, I’d like to say a big thank-you to all of the students for their hard work and wish them well in their studies at Oxford.

You can read another blog written about the students on the NHM’s library blog here:- http://www.nhm.ac.uk/natureplus/community/library/blog/2012/07/06/thank-you-to-our-harvard-students

-Caroline-