University of Iowa Libraries Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio Builds First-Ever Digital and Searchable Map of Principia Mathematica Through Multi-Institutional, NEH-Awarded Grant

From the University of Iowa Libraries:

With a $281,104 Scholarly Editions and Translations grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), researchers at the University of Iowa and Western Kentucky University collaborated to build the first-ever digital map and data table for all three volumes and 1,992 pages of Principia Mathematica—a monumental work in the philosophies of mathematics and logic.

This new digital resource, the Principia Mathematica Map and Table Site (PM-MATS), is the result of a three-year NEH grant awarded in 2023 and ongoing collaboration between the University of Iowa’s Matthew Butler, senior developer in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, Western Kentucky University’s Dr. Landon Elkind, assistant professor of philosophy in the Department of Political Science (and alumnus of the University of Iowa philosophy program, 2018), and the University of Iowa’s Dr. Gregory Landini, professor of philosophy. The new digital scholarly tools will be leveraged to produce the first-ever critical edition of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s landmark Principia Mathematica. The resulting scholarly edition will be published in print and digital formats with Cambridge University Press; Volume I of the new edition is slated for release in 2025.

Principia Mathematica first appeared as three volumes with Cambridge University Press in 1910, 1912, and 1913. A fourth volume on geometry was slated to appear but was never completed. It was one of the most symbolically dense works ever published and attempted to demonstrate Logicism—the view that all mathematical truths are logical truths. Principia ranks among the most influential books ever produced. Remarkably, Special Collections at the UI Libraries holds two complete sets of Principia’s first edition—only 500 were ever published.

Despite Principia’s enormous significance, the text appeared without an editorial apparatus, such as a bibliography, an index of symbols or significant terms, and a table of citations of theorems in proofs. The text has also never been digitized; the only versions of the text available are Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scans that do not facilitate even baseline searches of the text, much less data about the dependencies between parts of Principia that would facilitate a structural or “bird’s-eye” view of the text. This digital humanities project is changing that.

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The website debuted at the 51st Annual Bertrand Russell Society Meeting on June 7–9, 2024, at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, but was developed with the public in mind. The site includes a guide for users and an about page that explains the importance of Principia and the purpose of the digital project. In addition to using this map to facilitate producing a new critical edition of Principia, the project team plans further additions to the map, like allowing users to search for specific symbols in starred numbers. 

Learn More, Read the Complete Announcement

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