Darwin Correspondence Project (review)

The Darwin Correspondence Project has already spent over thirty years tracking down and publishing every known letter to or from Charles Darwin. Although a hefty new volume of letters currently appears every year, only half of the anticipated volumes have been published. And given their prohibitive cost (currently £75/$135 each), the recent news that more than five thousand of the letters are freely available via the Project's Web site has created considerable interest.

However, the experience of actually trying to use the Web site is likely to be a little frustrating to the casual visitor. The daily quote from a random Darwin letter is a nice touch, but in general the home page is confusing, with too many choices (such as "click here to read the Re:Design script") whose significance is not obvious.

The main content of the site falls into two parts. There is a searchable database that includes (among other things) the full, annotated text of all the surviving letters from the Beagle voyage and those from the years surrounding the Origin's publication. In addition, there is a short summary of each of the thousands of letters that are not yet online, as well as brief biographical details of every Darwin correspondent. These resources can be searched but are not easy to browse, so if you want to know what Darwin was thinking in, say, the summer of 1859 you first need to search for the relevant range of dates. This requires typing in text-based commands, and although these are clearly explained, a more intuitive search page might be useful.

Suppose, for example, you want to read the response to the famous letter in which Darwin compared admitting his belief in transmutation to "confessing a murder" but can remember neither who it was written to nor when. A search on "murder" gives twenty-nine hits, in chronological order: you now know that the letter was written to Joseph Hooker in 1844, but there is no link from this specific letter to its response. To find Hooker's reply you need to type the command "date:1844* AND author:Hooker" into the "advanced search" page (unfortunately the simple "search" box that appears on every page is too small for the longer search commands). This search brings up the ten letters that Hooker wrote Darwin in that year, which you can then browse through. However, as the site develops, it might be useful either to link letters and their replies, or allow users to move more easily from finding a specific letter to browsing the letters that follow or precede it.

There are already complete chronological lists available for each of the published volumes (though not for unpublished letters), but they can be found only by clicking on the "About the Project" link and then choosing "Publications" and then the year you're interested in. Hopefully, this unintuitive arrangement will be improved as the site grows.

The other major content on the site is a series of sections that explore Darwin's significance in relation to various historical topics. The first of these is about "Darwin & religion" and is, as the site clearly explains, a work in progress. There is already some valuable material here, but its target audience is unclear. The historical essay on "Design in Nature," for example, is ideal for an undergraduate audience but perhaps a bit too straightforward for more senior academics and too complex for the completely uninitiated. It might be worth developing specific sections targeted at school students, for example.

The Darwin Project's Web site is still developing; several of the problems I found when I first reviewed it have already been fixed. The resources it offers are already excellent (and have saved me many hours of searching in the course of my own research), but the interface limits their usefulness, instead of enhancing it. Like most academic sites, this one needs to be tested more thoroughly by actual users. However, once a new visitor has spent about half an hour using the site, they will find...