I’ve spent the last few days going through and transcribing the contents of the notebooks of Roger Sherman, who was a student at Yale in the late 1970s and did a bunch of research on the HSI collection (and ultimately made his own catalogue of a few objects).

The thing I find most striking about Sherman’s notebooks is the level of detail he has committed to the page by hand. Sketches, measurements, stories, bibliographic information: all of it is there, in black and blue ballpoint.

I recently sat in on a meeting of Peabody Museum staff to discuss the renovation of one of its interactive spaces, and several people at this meeting were very excited at the prospect of finding ways to invite visitors to draw objects on display. “When you draw something, you learn it,” someone said.

Sherman had definitely learned every inch of the instruments he researched. He describes what every single part of every machine is for, and his drawings are clear enough that they can be compared with the photographs in the online database we use now.

Sherman’s notes are even more meticulous and detailed than some entries in the database. When researching one object, he includes a paragraph-long explanation about the various rulers of France from 1815 to 1870 in order to make some guess about the date of an instrument made by someone calling themselves “Opticien de S.M. l’Empereur à Paris” (something like “optician to the Emperor at Paris”). 

These notes are not just a repository of information: they’re a concise example of the depth and breadth of human knowledge: science, history, art, writing, and research are all intertwined. All too often I hear people describe themselves as “STEM people” or “humanities people,” as if the two are mutually exclusive, or even distinguishable from one another. True, the daily experience of someone who does hard science is pretty different from what I do when I work on my Latin homework, but in the end, human thought and experience cannot be restricted to a single discipline.

I would go so far as to say that it’s dangerous to assume that our own fields exist in their own private realm. It’s when that happens that we lose empathy and interest in what people from different backgrounds have to say. Knowledge is interesting by itself, but it only becomes important when we place it in a broader context.