Description: More than two dozen field diaries by Irish naturalist Arthur Stelfox are housed in the Smithsonian Institution Archives--what a note left inside one field notebook tells us about his network of scientist colleagues.
Description: As we digitize the Archives’ collections to make them available online, I am constantly being exposed to handwriting from the past two centuries. As a result, I have a deeper appreciatiation of how many different things influence the way a person’s writing appears on the page, things beyond the quality of their penmanship. Writing on the deck of a ship, on horseback or on