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

britannica11.org

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

#111

Post by zozbot234 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #105
zozbot234 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So before you were talking about summarizing whole articles and asking the LLM to find the things that would be "beyond the pale", but now you're just suggesting using it to insert paragraph breaks and section headings?

The LLM will easily do both for you. Particularly the thinking it does when constructing the summary generally involves a structured close reading of your text, and you can easily think of it as providing "paragraph breaks and section headings".

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

#112

Post by Aransentin »

8bitsrule wrote: post #84

Some parts are ... amusing to read. For example the article on stars [0]... "anything approaching a uniform distribution of the stars cannot extend Limits of the Universe. indefinitely. It can be shown that, if the density of distribution of the stars through infinite space is nowhere less than a certain limit (which may be as small as we please), the total amount of light received from them (assuming that there is n…

The article about the Sun was quite fun; even though they didn't know about fusion, the article dismisses most theories about how it could generate such a large amount of energy (like chemical combustion or gravitational contraction).

IT says the most likely cause is some sort of "rearrangement of the structure of the elements' atoms" and "supposing a gaseous nebula is destined to condense into a sun, the elementary matter of which it is composed will develop in the process into our known terrestrial and solar elements, parting with energy as it does so". Pretty much as bang on as one could reasonably be given what they knew.

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

#113

Post by merryocha »

A book in my collection that I love is The Treasury of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a greatest hits collection from Britannica over the years. It has articles written by many famous names like James Maxwell, T.E. Lawrence, Einstein, JFK, Arthur Koestler, and many more. I love how Britannica articles are written by a single expert, giving the articles a bit of bias, humor, and character.

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

#114

Post by smallerize »

zozbot234 wrote: post #111
Dylan16807 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So before you were talking about summarizing whole articles and asking the LLM to find the things that would be "beyond the pale", but now you're just suggesting using it to insert paragraph breaks and section headings?

The LLM will easily do both for you. Particularly the thinking it does when constructing the summary generally involves a structured close reading of your text, and you can easily think of it as providing "paragraph breaks and section headings".

I think the word "summarization" might be throwing people off. This is like an expansion.

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

#115

Post by tim333 »

8bitsrule wrote: post #84

Some parts are ... amusing to read. For example the article on stars [0]... "anything approaching a uniform distribution of the stars cannot extend Limits of the Universe. indefinitely. It can be shown that, if the density of distribution of the stars through infinite space is nowhere less than a certain limit (which may be as small as we please), the total amount of light received from them (assuming that there is n…

Searching for "computer" the only one was one Chauncey Wright, American philosopher and mathematician, who became became computer to the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac.

https://britannica11.org/article/28-0872-wright-chauncey/wri...

Times change.

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

#116

Post by xnobodyx »

doctor_blood wrote: post #46

Small world - I'm currently cleaning up scans of the EB 9th edition to put it online as a mediawiki site; I'm including all the illustrations and plates so I'm only a third of the way through. I've been testing different OCR tools and so far I've been the most impressed with paddleOCR - it correctly split the text columns, labled the illustrations, and noted the maragin text. Still, it's not perfect, so I'm having to…

re: OCR of tables, would the work done on https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula / https://tabula.technology/ be relevant?

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

#117

Post by xnobodyx »

ahaspel wrote: post #42
peterldowns wrote: post #40

I've been meaning to build ~exactly this experience, but for the 1952 Encyclopedia Brittanica Great Books of the World collection and its experimental index Syntopicon [0]. Would love to know more about how you OCR'd or otherwise ingested and parsed the raw material. I have a physical copy of the books, and I found some samizdat raw-image scans and started working on a custom OCR pipeline, but wondering if maybe I co…

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 text and then built a pipeline around that: cleaning (headers, hyphenation, etc.), detecting article boundaries, reconstructing sections, and linking things back to the original page images. Most of the effort went into rendering the comple…

would love to hear more details. are you familiar with the semantic lab at pratt's work - https://semlab.io/projects (also see https://tools.semlab.io )?

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

#118

Post by Dylan16807 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #111
Dylan16807 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So before you were talking about summarizing whole articles and asking the LLM to find the things that would be "beyond the pale", but now you're just suggesting using it to insert paragraph breaks and section headings?

The LLM will easily do both for you. Particularly the thinking it does when constructing the summary generally involves a structured close reading of your text, and you can easily think of it as providing "paragraph breaks and section headings".

Sure it could do both, but the question is what are you suggesting?

If you're suggesting it alter the text beyond organizing it, people are going to be upset. And your first suggestion sounded like that.

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

#119

Post by gnerd00 »

dessimus wrote: post #80
gnerd00 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

better link here https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=Encyclopaedia...

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

#120

Post by mapontosevenths »

zozbot234 wrote: post #79
mapontosevenths wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

>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.

In the middle ages this was true, mostly because few people were literate at all and the words didnt have spaces between them. The ability to read silently was regarded as impressive.

By 1911 reading silently to yourself was the expectation of a normal literate adult. Only hillbillies and their ilk could not.

This is a simple text, intended to be legible even to school children of the era. It's also very structured already.

Their contemporary English was a bit different, but not so far removed that you should need assistance.

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