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

britannica11.org

11–20 of 138 posts

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

#11
post #6

The most important entry I found in my physical copy of the 1911 Britannica is for Eavesdropping[0], detailing the original historical origins of the term and how it was thought about just before our modern era. > Though the offence of eavesdropping still exists at common law, there is no modern instance of a prosecution or indictment. Thanks for posting this resource, I've often wanted to share a link to this and ot…

That’s exactly the use case I had in mind. The 11th is full of gems like that, but they’ve never been easy to point people to.

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

#13
I spent ages trying to work out if it would be possible to find a copy of the 2021 Encarta or Britannica.

Pre LLM And post COVID and perhaps the best we can hope for before AI taints all the info.

One of my prized possessions as a child was a CDROM based encyclopedia (well before the internet was common). I don't know why I liked it so much but on a rainy afternoon I'd kick up some of my favourite articles and read and learn more of them.

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

#14

Just as a random data point, I searched for Genghis and nothing came up. Was there not much knowledge on Genghis Khan in 1911 I wonder?

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

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

#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 "Progressive Era", not sullied yet by thoughts of "the war to end all wars".

Trying https://britannica11.org specifically, it quickly found and displayed the article I searched for, chosen (to search for) at random: Portuguese East Africa, at https://britannica11.org/article/22-0177-portuguese-east-afr...

A question/idea for nice-to-haves, most respectfully. I don't know if it would be feasible. It's probably perfect as it is, simply linking to the image-page in unobtrusive text for each section. But I would love an option (emphasis on option) to see the text side by side with the page images. That parallel view would load all of the page images on the same page as the full article text. That way, I could "confirm" or "fact check" the faithfulness of the OCR, and also see the beautiful printing, at once, without opening each page separately and managing the images/windows myself. Most likely, I would use the site to jump to the articles, and read them mainly as images, only switching to the text form to verify what something said, or to copy-paste cleanly, etc. (As it is, initially, I thought I read the original images were available, but had to visit the page three (3!) times before finding where the side-links to them were.) Maybe thumbnails could be a middle-ground option (again, optional) for salience.

Very, very well done. And it's fast!

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

#16
post #10
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 ?

I guess such an old edition is in the public domain

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

#17
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks so much for sharing this. It looks fantastic. A couple of questions, if you don't mind: what license are you releasing this under, if any? Is there any way to download it? The reason someone might want to download it is for use as training data.

Thanks! The underlying text (1911 edition) is public domain, but the structured version here — the parsing, reconstruction, and linking — is something I put together for this site. Right now there isn’t a bulk download available. I’m considering exposing structured access (API or dataset) in some form, but haven’t decided exactly how that will work yet. If you have a specific use case in mind (especially for training…

Regarding the specific use case, I was thinking this: I had Gemma 4 (a small but highly capable offline model released by Google) make a public domain cc0 encyclopedia of some core science and technology concepts[1]. I thought it was pretty good.

Separately, I've fine-tuned the Gemma 4 model[2], it was very quick (just 90 seconds), so I think it could be interesting to train it to talk like 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

I would use the entries as training data and train it to talk in the same style. There isn't a specific use case for why, I just think it would be interesting. For example, I could see how it writes about modern concepts in the style of 1911 Britannica.

[1] https://stateofutopia.com/encyclopedia/

[2] To talk like a pirate! https://www.youtube.com/live/WuCxWJhrkIM

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

#18

I spent ages trying to work out if it would be possible to find a copy of the 2021 Encarta or Britannica. Pre LLM And post COVID and perhaps the best we can hope for before AI taints all the info. One of my prized possessions as a child was a CDROM based encyclopedia (well before the internet was common). I don't know why I liked it so much but on a rainy afternoon I'd kick up some of my favourite articles and read a…

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 of the motivation here was to bring that kind of exploration back, but with the original 1911 text and structure.

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

#19

I spent ages trying to work out if it would be possible to find a copy of the 2021 Encarta or Britannica. Pre LLM And post COVID and perhaps the best we can hope for before AI taints all the info. One of my prized possessions as a child was a CDROM based encyclopedia (well before the internet was common). I don't know why I liked it so much but on a rainy afternoon I'd kick up some of my favourite articles and read a…

2004: https://archive.org/details/britannica-2004

2009: https://archive.org/details/britannica-multimedia-dvd-2009-d...

2012: https://archive.org/details/britannica-dvd_20230709

2013: https://archive.org/details/encyclopedia-britannica-dvd-2013

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

#20

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…

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 you mention (verifying the text and seeing the original layout). I haven’t built that yet, but I’ve considered it.

Also helpful to hear that the links to the scans weren’t immediately obvious — I should probably make them a bit clearer. This may also not be obvious, but you can click the vol:page links in the left margin and go directly to the scan of whatever page you're reading.

Thanks again.

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