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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

#31

Post by pawsocks »

ahaspel wrote: post #18
rustyhancock wrote: post #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 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.

Do you happen to use a language model to translate or format your comments?

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

#32

Post by ahaspel »

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…

Yes, that’s one of the things I like most about it. The articles have a personal tone and are less homogenized.

You get that mix of geography, history, and sometimes quite opinionated description all in one place, which makes them much more readable, in my view. My introduction to this version discusses this and other related matters: https://britannica11.org/about.html

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

#33

Post by timciep »

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/

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

#34

Post by neonscribe »

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 years, and milder, more graduated exercise taken at other times. In the same way all mental strain should be diminished. Instead of pressure being put on a girl’s intellectual education at about this time, as is too often the case, the time devoted to school and books should be diminished. Education should be on broader, more fundamental lines, and much time should be passed in the open air."

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

#35

Post by ahaspel »

pawsocks wrote: post #31
ahaspel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you happen to use a language model to translate or format your comments?

Just me. I spent a lot of time thinking about this, so I like talking about it.

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

#36

Post by ahmedfromtunis »

No entry on the Great War? Really?!!!

Just kidding, of course. This is incredible and surprisingly nostalgic. Reading some of the entries took me right back to being a kid huddled in my room for hours pouring over an encyclopedia or even the dictionary.

And I still vividly remember the rush of installing Encarta for the first time on the family PC.

I couldn't believe that I, a mere kid, have now access to iconic historical footage and that I can watch anytime I felt like it. I can't describe how amazingly cool that felt at the time! It still gives me a hit of endorphins when I remember it today.

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

#37

Post by spudlyo »

I'm curious how the information is structured under the hood. I just recently learned about how folks in the digital humanities use the XML-TEI format for semantic markup of works like this. I've recently been exploring the Latin-English Lewis & Short dictionary encoded in XML-TEI.

I've had a ton of fun playing learning about BaseX and XQuery to ask questions like "Which classical authors are responsible for writing words that appear only once in the entire corpus (hapax legomena)" or "what are longest hapax words" (usually the funniest ones) and that kind of thing. Shout out to Tufts University for making this available!

I would love to be able to load the 1911 Britannica into BaseX and and see what interesting things I could learn about it via XQuery!

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

#38

Post by ahaspel »

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…

No doubt. That’s one of the reasons I find the 1911 edition interesting — the authors have more license to express their own opinions, which naturally reflect those current at the time.

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

#39

Post by ahaspel »

spudlyo wrote: post #37

I'm curious how the information is structured under the hood. I just recently learned about how folks in the digital humanities use the XML-TEI format for semantic markup of works like this. I've recently been exploring the Latin-English Lewis & Short dictionary encoded in XML-TEI. I've had a ton of fun playing learning about BaseX and XQuery to ask questions like "Which classical authors are responsible for writing…

Under the hood it’s not XML-TEI — it’s a relational/data-pipeline approach, with article boundaries, sections, contributors, cross-references, and source-page provenance all reconstructed into structured records. The text itself is public domain, but I haven’t released a bulk structured export yet.

People asking for dataset access has definitely been one of the themes of this thread. I’m taking that seriously. If I do expose it, I’d want to do it in a form that preserves the structure and doesn't just dump plain text.

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

#40

Post by peterldowns »

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 could learn from your approach...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Syntopicon

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