Viewing profile — ahaspel

There's also a side-by-side option now. On any article, clicking the little scan button above the double-navigation arrows in the right margin will open the scan at whatever page y…

These were both pipeline errors and they have just been corrected, thanks to your sharp eyes.

This is now fixed, along with several more serious rendering errors in "United States". Thanks a lot for pointing it out.

Thanks for the kind words. I've had a few requests for a technical appendix (i.e., "how I built this") and it is in the works.

Not a bad idea. I'll see what I can work out on that score. But I imagine the far more common path is from the Guide to the encyclopedia than the reverse.

The Reader's Guide has been added to the ancillary material. Thanks for the excellent suggestion.

I wanted to let everyone know that article search from articles is now working properly again. A path problem. Apologies.

Thanks, nice catch. The tables can be tricky and I appreciate the heads-up on this markup leak. It will be corrected shortly.

It would indeed. I will see about working this in, it's highly pertinent.

I'm looking forward to it. The 9th is great in its own right and a lot of it is in the 11th. Alfred Newton's nearly 200 articles on bird species and a few classic essays by Macaula…

If you're reading an article, just go to the top and type in the left-hand search box. That will search for articles as well as text within articles. The right-hand box searches th…

I feel exactly the same way about encyclopedias and dictionaries. And Encarta really was amazing. You'd be surprised how much modern criticism of the 11th amounts to "no entry on t…

I'm familiar with the Synopticon, which would be fun to structure. I didn’t do OCR myself, except for the topic index and to fill in a few gaps. I started from existing Wikisource …

Under the hood it’s not XML-TEI — it’s a relational/data-pipeline approach, with article boundaries, sections, contributors, cross-references, and source-page provenance all recons…

No doubt. That’s one of the reasons I find the 1911 edition interesting — the authors have more license to express their own opinions, which naturally reflect those current at the …

Just me. I spent a lot of time thinking about this, so I like talking about it.

Yes, that’s one of the things I like most about it. The articles have a personal tone and are less homogenized. You get that mix of geography, history, and sometimes quite opiniona…

I hadn’t seen that before, it’s a great collection. I like the breadth across editions.

That’s a fun idea — I can see the appeal of that style. The underlying text is public domain, but the structured version here is something I put together for the site. I haven’t re…

Excellent points. There are indeed two Zurich articles. One way to get to the city is to search for Zurich and open the second one, which goes to the city directly. The xref in Zur…

The 1911 text itself is public domain, so anyone is free to use it. What I’ve built here is a structured edition — the parsing, reconstruction, linking, indexing, etc. I haven’t pu…

Thanks — really appreciate that, and glad it worked well for a random article. That’s a great suggestion. A side-by-side text + page view would be very nice for exactly the reasons…

I know exactly what you mean — I had the same experience with CD-ROM encyclopedias. There’s something about just browsing and falling into articles that’s hard to replicate. Part o…

Try Jenghiz Khan. That's how they used to spell it then. Or just plain Khan and scroll the results.