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There's also a side-by-side option now. On any article, clicking the little scan button above the double-navigation arrows in the right margin will open the scan at whatever page you're viewing, and it will scroll as you scroll the text.

Thanks for the suggestion.

These were both pipeline errors and they have just been corrected, thanks to your sharp eyes.

This is now fixed, along with several more serious rendering errors in "United States". Thanks a lot for pointing it out.

Thanks for the kind words. I've had a few requests for a technical appendix (i.e., "how I built this") and it is in the works.

Not a bad idea. I'll see what I can work out on that score. But I imagine the far more common path is from the Guide to the encyclopedia than the reverse.

The Reader's Guide has been added to the ancillary material. Thanks for the excellent suggestion.

I wanted to let everyone know that article search from articles is now working properly again. A path problem. Apologies.

Thanks, nice catch. The tables can be tricky and I appreciate the heads-up on this markup leak. It will be corrected shortly.

It would indeed. I will see about working this in, it's highly pertinent.

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.

If you're reading an article, just go to the top and type in the left-hand search box. That will search for articles as well as text within articles. The right-hand box searches the text of the article you're reading.

I feel exactly the same way about encyclopedias and dictionaries. And Encarta really was amazing. You'd be surprised how much modern criticism of the 11th amounts to "no entry on the Great War", except in earnest.

I'm familiar with the Syntopicon, which would be fun to structure.

I didn’t do OCR myself, except for the topic index and to fill in a few gaps. I started from existing Wikisource text and then built a pipeline around that: cleaning (headers, hyphenation, etc.), detecting article boundaries, reconstructing sections, and linking things back to the original page images. Most of the effort went into rendering the complex layouts, and handling the cross-linking, not the initial ingestion.

Glad to go into more detail if you’re interested, but that’s the gist of it.

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.

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.

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

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

I hadn’t seen that before, it’s a great collection. I like the breadth across editions.

That’s a fun idea — I can see the appeal of that style.

The underlying text is public domain, but the structured version here is something I put together for the site. I haven’t released a bulk dataset yet.

If you end up experimenting with it, I’d love to hear how it turns out — and I’m still figuring out what structured access might look like.

Excellent points. There are indeed two Zurich articles. One way to get to the city is to search for Zurich and open the second one, which goes to the city directly. The xref in Zurich (canton) is indeed a disambiguation bug (identically named articles); thanks for catching that.

I haven't tested the article search box on the article viewer in Firefox. I'll look into that as well.

Making the title linkable is a great idea and it will be implemented shortly. Thanks for catching all of this.

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.

Thanks — really appreciate that, and glad it worked well for a random article.

That’s a great suggestion. A side-by-side text + page view would be very nice for exactly the reasons you mention (verifying the text and seeing the original layout). I haven’t built that yet, but I’ve considered it.

Also helpful to hear that the links to the scans weren’t immediately obvious — I should probably make them a bit clearer. This may also not be obvious, but you can click the vol:page links in the left margin and go directly to the scan of whatever page you're reading.

Thanks again.

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.

Try Jenghiz Khan. That's how they used to spell it then. Or just plain Khan and scroll the results.

That’s exactly the use case I had in mind. The 11th is full of gems like that, but they’ve never been easy to point people to.

That’s high praise. Those are both great projects and this one is definitely in the same spirit.

Good catch — thanks. That’s a font coverage issue. I’ll either swap in a fallback font for missing glyphs or normalize those cases. This only sounds trivial, this project is full of items like that.

Thanks!

The underlying text (1911 edition) is public domain, but the structured version here — the parsing, reconstruction, and linking — is something I put together for this site. Right now there isn’t a bulk download available. I’m considering exposing structured access (API or dataset) in some form, but haven’t decided exactly how that will work yet.

If you have a specific use case in mind (especially for training), I’d be interested to hear more.

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 scans for each page – ancillary material included (prefaces, abbreviations, etc.) – topic index reproduced and cross-linked – full-text search with article metadata (length, volume, etc.)

Most of the work was in parsing and reconstruction: headings, multi-page articles, tables, math, languages, footnotes, plates, and all the small edge cases that come up in a work like this.

The goal was to make something that feels like the original, but is actually usable.

I’d especially appreciate feedback on: – search quality – navigation (sections, cross-references) – anything that looks structurally off

Happy to answer questions about the pipeline or data model