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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

#101

Post by krige »

shantara wrote: post #27

Interesting how different both the tone and the structure of the articles are compared to the modern texts. Take the article about Copenhagen as an example: https://britannica11.org/article/07-0111-copenhagen/copenhag... The geography and key points of interest are described very accurately, but the authors aren’t shy about inserting emotionally charged adjectives and personal options on what they consider interestin…

Looking at Victor Hugo's entry I immediately spotted this

> After yet another three years’ space the author of La Légende des siècles reappeared as the author of Les Misérables, the greatest epic and dramatic work of fiction ever created or conceived: the epic of a soul transfigured and redeemed, purified by heroism and glorified through suffering; the tragedy and the comedy of life at its darkest and its brightest, of humanity at its best and at its worst.

Sure sounds like someone was a (fellow) fan.

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

#102

Post by ternaryoperator »

I have the hard copy of this edition and it does contain some curious things.

For example, if you look up "boiling." You might expect to read about what happens to a liquid when it's heated to a certain temperature, or perhaps a way of cooking foods, or sterilizing equipment. But the entry covers none of those. Instead, the only entry for boiling describes a punishment for persons convicting of poisoning who were, in England, dipped into a large cauldron of boiling water.

And, in the ways that violence and torture were wantonly reveled in centuries ago, they wouldn't just submerge the criminal and let him die there. Instead, they would lower him into the boiling water for a while and then pull him out. They'd repeat the process until eventually they finally killed him. That is the EB 11 ed entry for boiling. Yow!

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

#103

Post by golem14 »

It's very insightful to look up fission, fusion, atom and find yourself ... definitely before the great war.

As a time travel machine for the mind, this is great!

It would also be an invaluable resource for any Dungeon Master aspiring to lead a campaign at the end of the 19th century (Sherlock Holmes, or PG Wodehouse style, as it were), as doubtless many here are ...

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

#104

Post by stereolambda »

zozbot234 wrote: post #47
neonscribe wrote: post #34

You can discover beliefs that are shocking today, such as this excerpt from the article "Adolescence": "In the case of girls, let them run, leap and climb with their brothers for the first twelve years or so of life. But as puberty approaches, with all the change, stress and strain dependent thereon, their lives should be appropriately modified. Rest should be enforced during the menstrual periods of these earlier ye…

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…

Entertaining to think that "that's too difficult to read for us nowadays" and "look at these unacceptable things" already sound pretty much like some poor Medieval literates who got their hands on Ovid or Lucretius, while under the rule of king Theodoric or something.

I don't have to say I don't question that we are very civilized and powerful.

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

#105

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

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?

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

#107

Post by bentley »

The first article I looked up was New Mexico, because I knew, as does anyone familiar with New Mexico history, that it became a state in January 1912 (before which it was a territory). Arizona also became a state, in February. I was surprised to find both described as states of the United States in this 1911 encyclopedia. I suppose the editors just made a confident guess? The last sentence of both articles is, “In June 1910 the President approved an enabling act providing for the admission of Arizona and New Mexico as separate states.”

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

#108

Post by bentley »

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…

There’s an escaping issue in tables of contents. See, e.g., “Roosevelt's” in the “United States” article. https://britannica11.org/article/27-0635-united-states-the/u...

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

#109

Post by bentley »

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.

> They only release books that are in the public domain.

Not necessarily. Project Gutenberg does provide some works still under US copyright, such as F. P. Walter’s 1999 translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2488

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

#110

Post by sammy2255 »

This encyclopedia is racist:

Mentally the negro is inferior to the white, The remark of F. Manetta, made after a long study of the negro in America, may be taken as generally true of the whole race: “the negro children were sharp, intelligent and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change set in. The intellect seemed to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence.

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