Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

britannica11.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 138 posts

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#71

Post by masfuerte »

timciep wrote: post #33
keane wrote: post #7

Beautiful work! This is an amazing resource to have online. Reminds me a little of greensdictofslang.com or of Webster’s 1913, a perennial HN favorite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29733648

These projects came to mind for me, as well. I actually took a recent crack at making a more modern website for Websters 1913: https://websters1913.timcieplowski.com/

That's lovely. I do like a site that just works without a pile of unnecessary js guff.

There's a bit of funkiness with "https://websters1913.timcieplowski.com/word/mathematic/

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#72

Post by Soluod »

ahaspel wrote: post #2

I rebuilt the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica into a clean, structured, navigable site: https://britannica11.org/ What it does: – ~37k articles reconstructed from the original volumes – section-level structure (contents are clickable within articles) – cross-references extracted and linked – contributors indexed and searchable – original volume + page references preserved and shown while reading – links to the original…

[dead]

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#73

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

zozbot234 wrote: post #60
smallerize wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't really explain what that does for you. Why do you paste it into an LLM?

I'm not sure if you're familiar with public domain texts from around the 19th or early 20th century, but they were not intended to be skimmed or speed-read the way we'd skim a modern text prior to getting into a more attentive close-reading. Even their short magazine articles were actually the near-equivalent to our scholarly papers, and were often read aloud at length in parlor gatherings. So having a LLM split the…

The trick is to have a basic level of literacy and then you don't need the machine to chew it up for you like a mother bird.

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#75

Post by mapontosevenths »

doubletwoyou wrote: post #51
zozbot234 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can nowadays paste the text from pretty much anything that's in the public domain into a near-SOTA LLM such as Kimi or GLM and it will give you a pretty nice summary of what it's about in modern language (Extremely useful: the LLM tendency to go overboard on formatting nicely balances out the wall-of-text format from historical publications, which was aimed at saving paper and minimizing manual layout effort), an…

I beg of thee, use that brain of yours and read a text that was made scarcely more than a century ago, a blink of an eye in the grand scale of the changes of the linguistic features of English, and interpret it for yourself.

I'm in favor of using all the tools available to better yourself, including LLM's. However, for things like this the I would argue that one should first try to understand it on their own.

Sometimes the work is the POINT. We read things like this not just to learn about the past, but for novelty and to exercise our critical thinking powers. To outsource that labor before even trying is like going to the gym and having your butler lift the weights. The weights got lifted, but what was really accomplished?

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#76

Post by nyc_pizzadev »

ahaspel wrote: post #2

I rebuilt the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica into a clean, structured, navigable site: https://britannica11.org/ What it does: – ~37k articles reconstructed from the original volumes – section-level structure (contents are clickable within articles) – cross-references extracted and linked – contributors indexed and searchable – original volume + page references preserved and shown while reading – links to the original…

Very nice. I actually spent a bit of time browsing a few topics, which is something I rarely do these days!

A few things... when I click an article and try to jump to a new topic, the top search box (labeled "Search titles and full text...") doesn't work. Second, when I first came to the site, I was a bit stuck. It took a bit of time to realize I need to click on "Articles" or even "Topics" to start browsing. Not sure why, maybe I expected the image to let me enter the site somehow...?

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#77

Post by lobster45 »

Reading medical texts from 1911 is a great way to see how far psychiatry has advanced. there was a widespread medical and societal belief that masturbation was harmful to physical and mental health. https://britannica11.org/article/14-0628-insanity/insanity?q...

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#78

Post by realityfactchex »

aragonite wrote: post #56
realityfactchex wrote: post #15

Very, very cool. Hats off. I've considered attempting a more limited form of this for years. For those who don't know, the 1911 Britannica is heralded for several reasons (and rightly criticized for regrettable others), but the most well-known is that it was the last encyclopedia before The Great War, and hence had a good amount of steam/optimism coming from the first and second industrial revolutions and the "Progre…

> But I would love an option (emphasis on option) to see the text side by side with the page images. ... That way, I could "confirm" or "fact check" the faithfulness of the OCR. You can already do that on Wikisource. For example, here's p. 658 from the entry on "Molecule": https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:EB1911_-_Volume_18.djvu/... Also OP: I noticed some fidelity issues in your version (at https://britannica11.o…

That's cool about the WikiSource parallel text+image page view, TIL. Thanks!

As an example flow (since it took a minute to figure out): we can start at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica then click to navigate/browse volume > section > topic to get to a text page, then click Source tab, then click a Page Number (maybe hunt around for the correct page number), and see the parallel view, text + image. With previous and next page buttons available, retaining the parallel text + image view.

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#79

Post by zozbot234 »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #75
doubletwoyou wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg of thee, use that brain of yours and read a text that was made scarcely more than a century ago, a blink of an eye in the grand scale of the changes of the linguistic features of English, and interpret it for yourself.

I'm in favor of using all the tools available to better yourself, including LLM's. However, for things like this the I would argue that one should first try to understand it on their own. Sometimes the work is the POINT. We read things like this not just to learn about the past, but for novelty and to exercise our critical thinking powers. To outsource that labor before even trying is like going to the gym and having…

Historically, these texts were often consumed (especially in formal or semi-formal settings) by either having them read aloud for you or reading them aloud yourself. They were more like a written-down formal speech to be slowly pondered upon than something to be read smoothly and silently on one's own, which is how we now regard almost all texts. There was "labor" involved but that labor was not really about being more literate or exercising more critical thinking: it was simply about slowly recreating in one's mind the kind of broad structural scaffold we now expect to see in a text as a matter of course. It's in fact easier to think critically about a text when its sections and structure are clearly laid out, and having a LLM do this for you is a nice way of avoiding personal tendencies and biases that might lead one to misinterpret what the text is really about.

Re: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

#80

Post by dessimus »

gnerd00 wrote: post #10
ahaspel wrote: post #2

I rebuilt the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica into a clean, structured, navigable site: https://britannica11.org/ What it does: – ~37k articles reconstructed from the original volumes – section-level structure (contents are clickable within articles) – cross-references extracted and linked – contributors indexed and searchable – original volume + page references preserved and shown while reading – links to the original…

legal terms question here also -- several major world economies are operating under very different rules regarding datasets and publication rights. I am in the USA / California.. will there be terms for me, given that I am not a giant deep-pockets FAANG, just a book person ? commercial use terms for "small business" scale ?

It's been on Project Gutenburg for over 20 years: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13600

They only release books that are in the public domain.

Post reply on HN