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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

#91

Post by qmr »

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 having a LLM split the text into manageable sections for you and provide a hint of what each lengthy wall-of-text paragraph will be about is actually a huge gain in readability.

Perhaps your attention span needs improvement.

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

#99

Post by Kerrick »

ahaspel wrote: post #21
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 ?

The 1911 text itself is public domain, so anyone is free to use it. What I’ve built here is a structured edition — the parsing, reconstruction, linking, indexing, etc. I haven’t published a formal license for that yet. For casual or small-scale use there’s no issue at all. For bulk use (e.g. dataset / training / redistribution), I’d prefer people get in touch so I can figure out a sensible way to support that.

> What I’ve built here is a structured edition — the parsing, reconstruction, linking, indexing, etc. I haven’t published a formal license for that yet.

If you live in the U.S. I recommend you read No Sweat of the Brow Copyright: https://www.gutenberg.org/help/no_sweat_copyright.html

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

#100

Post by huijzer »

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…

Really nice. Well done.

As a feature request, would it possible for your pipeline to also create an EPUB? Then people can easily access and search through the document even when your site would go down. EPUB by default uses compression so the file size might even not be too bad for the full encyclopedia.

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