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

Re:Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyc... by doctor_blood on Tuesday April 21, 2026 @03:26PM (#47853350)

Small world - I'm currently cleaning up scans of the EB 9th edition to put it online as a mediawiki site; I'm including all the illustrations and plates so I'm only a third of the way through.

I've been testing different OCR tools and so far I've been the most impressed with paddleOCR - it correctly split the text columns, labled the illustrations, and noted the maragin text.

Still, it's not perfect, so I'm having to hand-edit some tables. I plan to put the source pages online as well so you can switch between the scanned page and the electronic text.

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Re:Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyc... by doctor_blood on Tuesday April 21, 2026 @03:56PM (#47853719)

For those unfamiliar, the 1875 9th ed. was known as the scholar's edition due to how many eminent persons had contributed; it's a fascinating snapshot of the late 1800s.

Other material that would be fun to put online in a hyperlinked and indexed format include geographic and medical atlases and the Baedeker travel guides.

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Re:Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyc... by ahaspel on Tuesday April 21, 2026 @03:59PM (#47853766)

I'm looking forward to it. The 9th is a great in its own right and a lot of it is in the 11th. Alfred Newton's nearly 200 articles on bird species and a few classic essays by Macaulay come to mind offhand.

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Re:Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyc... by xnobodyx on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @01:43PM (#47866818)

re: OCR of tables, would the work done on https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula / https://tabula.technology/ be relevant?

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