Re:Leonardo's Notebook Digitized in All Its Befuddling Glory
by nullc on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @12:54AM
(#5205411)
God forbid you want to save the data for personal archival or bulk digital analysis. If they allowed that you might defeat the museums careful control and curation of the data and potentially even use it in ways they don't agree with!
Re:Leonardo's Notebook Digitized in All Its Befuddling Glory
by jaysonelliot on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @02:05AM
(#5205594)
One of the greatest treasures of Western scholarship has been made available for the public to view at their leisure, in such stunning high resolution that you can zoom into the very grain of the paper.
Absolutely anyone with a web browser can instantly access what was once available only to a select few scholars, and even then only under the least convenient of circumstances.
A mere handful of years ago, the only way the average person would have even seen one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks would be in a museum display, assuming they knew of the display, had the wherewithal to visit, and the resources to get there if it wasn't in their own city.
Now, the British Museum has made literally hundreds of priceless manuscripts, from da Vinci to Beowulf, available to even the most casual reader who happens to click on a link, thanks to their careful preservation, curation, and digitization, all at no cost to the viewer.
What's the response? Complaining.
"Yes, fine, but I wanted to _download_ it, not just see it!"
Re:Leonardo's Notebook Digitized in All Its Befuddling Glory
by sgift on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @03:19AM
(#5205763)
Complaining is the main source of progress. The British Museum wouldn't have done this without anyone complaining. The British Museum wouldn't even exist without anyone complaining "but we need to save all this knowledge ..." and so on. People always lament the complaining but never praise it as the source of progress it is.
Re:Leonardo's Notebook Digitized in All Its Befuddling Glory
by martinwnet on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @07:53AM
(#5206452)
It's a humongous, impressive step that the notebook has been digitized and made publicly available. Surely the step to be able to download is only a trivial slight further step, the flicking of a switch, that has been prevented probably just for some bureaucratic reason.
Re:Leonardo's Notebook Digitized in All Its Befuddling Glory
by ZeroGravitas on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @04:42AM
(#5205969)
Didn't Wikipedia decide similar terms were just scary legal BS and download all the high resolution images of public domain scans from another museum's website anyway?
Re:Leonardo's Notebook Digitized in All Its Befuddling Glory
by slavak on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @06:03AM
(#5206126)
Did they really place a stamp of the British Museum on every page of this priceless historical artifact? I'm not being facetious, I was honestly surprised to see that.
Re:Leonardo's Notebook Digitized in All Its Befuddling Glory
by namank on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @01:12AM
(#5205450)
This is amazing, a big thanks to that museum!!
He wrote latin and that too right to left (that was drm) if that helps anyone here. Of course, it's just easier to check out the commentary on than his actual work.
Re:Leonardo's Notebook Digitized in All Its Befuddling Glory
by joshuaheard on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @02:33AM
(#5205666)
I visited the Da Vinci museum in Florence, Italy, and Da Vinci was far ahead of his time, inventing the idea of the helicopter, bicycle, parachute, machine gun, scuba, and many others. A true genius. Oh, he also painted the Mona Lisa, probably the most famous painting of all time.
:P
Absolutely anyone with a web browser can instantly access what was once available only to a select few scholars, and even then only under the least convenient of circumstances.
A mere handful of years ago, the only way the average person would have even seen one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks would be in a museum display, assuming they knew of the display, had the wherewithal to visit, and the resources to get there if it wasn't in their own city.
Now, the British Museum has made literally hundreds of priceless manuscripts, from da Vinci to Beowulf, available to even the most casual reader who happens to click on a link, thanks to their careful preservation, curation, and digitization, all at no cost to the viewer.
What's the response? Complaining. "Yes, fine, but I wanted to _download_ it, not just see it!"
Yup, this is the Internet, alright.
Looks like the format is:
Pages work in this fashion: f001r, f001v, f002r, f002v, f003r, f003v, ... and ends at f283v.At resolution 14, columns range from 0 to 33 and rows range from 0 to 24.
Edit: I hacked together a python script to download all images at resolution 14 https://gist.github.com/L1fescape/4761013
Now to figure out how to combine them all...
http://wiki.thorx.net/wiki/JPEGhack
http://jpegclub.org/jpegtran/
ImageMagick's montage command will probably do it: http://konrad.strack.pl/blog/image-concatenation-with-imagem...
Also tiffcp and then tiff2pdf are how I've made pdfs of such image collections in the past.
Not legal under
> European Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the council of May 22, 2001
and probably the DMCA.
http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/uk-national-portrait.html
The clueless idiot that got their stamp pad out that day is probably long retired or dead.
That big black stamp on page 2 doesn't look original either though, to be fair."ex dono" = as gift.
He wrote latin and that too right to left (that was drm) if that helps anyone here. Of course, it's just easier to check out the commentary on than his actual work.