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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

#61

Post by smallerize »

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…

Oh well that was the whole point to me. If I wanted to read something that's not from 1911 I could just do that lol

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

#62

Post by ahaspel »

zozbot234 wrote: post #53
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…

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.

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

#64

Post by hoppyhoppy2 »

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…

The final release of Encarta was in 2009.

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

#65

Post by genghisjahn »

ahaspel wrote: post #38
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.

"Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us."

On Reading Old Books C. S. Lewis

https://bradleyggreen.com/attachments/article/97/Lewis.On-Re...

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

#67

Post by keane »

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…

Mostly from a bit further back but you might enjoy https://earlymoderntexts.com/texts

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

#68

Post by yieldcrv »

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…

It’s only shocking to write it, or declare it as sacrosanct

Many people practice it, and women’s movements that put most energy on doing the opposite have since dialed back to pointing out that they were fighting for choice, including that choice of not being in a workforce. An option of a “soft life” that is wildly popular, and timeless. People just needed a new way to say it.

If it was culturally supported for men to be subsidized by another, a large percentage of men would immediately take that graduated and intellectually diminished role too. This is not a reliable option and is rare.

If common, it would unironically solve representation imbalances in other fields, since it would no longer be about shoehorning women into them, because enough men would leave on their own. A level of enlightenment still missing from Women in fireside chats at every industry conference worldwide

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

#70

Post by arichard123 »

This is good. I picked up a copy of the encyclopedia britannica from 1973 and quite enjoy browsing that rather than the internet. The articles seem well written, and as mentioned here, you have the fact and the history and everything all mixed in to some articles, and it's super interesting.

I highly recommend getting an old set of volumes.

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