121–130 of 138 posts
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...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
which says that "(the first known written reference dates from 1613)... often women from the late nineteenth century onwards, were used to undertake long and often tedious calculations; the work was divided so that this could be done in parallel."
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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.
When I thought I recalled 'computer' used to be a job title, I found this on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) which says that "(the first known written reference dates from 1613)... often women from the late nineteenth century onwards, were used to undertake long and often tedious calculations; the work was divided so that this could be done in parallel."
Review of 2005 book "When Computers Were Human" 424pp. ISBN: 0-691-09157-9
https://web.archive.org/web/20060821120909/http://www.pupres...
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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…
> It's also very structured already.
It's definitely not very structured by modern standards. The length of paragraphs alone would be described as "wall of text". Again, this was an ordinary practice back in the day, aimed at saving costly paper and reducing the manual effort involved in physically laying out the work on the page. It was far from exceptional: to a first approximation, most texts from the early 20th c. or before will look like that.
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…
You might want to add The Reader's Guide to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, PD text available at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74039 and scans at https://archive.org/details/readersguidetoen00londuoft - It would fit naturally with the Ancillary material that includes the topic-based index.
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You might want to add The Reader's Guide to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, PD text available at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74039 and scans at https://archive.org/details/readersguidetoen00londuoft - It would fit naturally with the Ancillary material that includes the topic-based index.
It would indeed. I will see about working this in, it's highly pertinent.
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You might want to add The Reader's Guide to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, PD text available at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74039 and scans at https://archive.org/details/readersguidetoen00londuoft - It would fit naturally with the Ancillary material that includes the topic-based index.
The Reader's Guide has been added to the ancillary material. Thanks for the excellent suggestion.