My first anniversary at Distributed Proofreaders

Today is exactly one year since I've joined Distributed Proofreaders. It's a project for producing electronic texts of public domain books (from classic to obscure) for the website Project Gutenberg (which is one of the largest such websites, and has existed in some form since the 1970s). The work of producing a text is split up so that many people can work on it at the same time. Most of the work of producing an accurate text is the work of correcting and formatting text that has been extracted by software (known as OCR) from a scan of a book's page; in DP, proofreaders log on to the site and, via specialized software, compare the digital text and image side-by-side. One page is proofread at a time by any one person.

It's a lot of fun. It provides a way to indulge two of my favorite things, old books and computers, at the same time. There's a combination of flexibility and seriousness in the structure. The activity level is high as books move through the site and eventually end up on PG. Also, it demystifies the process of producing electronic texts, which is easier than one might think.

Some of the authors I've proofread during this time: Jane Addams, Edmund Burke, Augustus de Morgan, Mary Mapes Dodge (as editor), Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Froebel, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Henry Huxley, Maurus Jokai ("the Shakespeare of Hungary"), John Maynard Keynes, H. P. Lovecraft, Thomas Paine, George Santayana, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace.

I proofread just over 1,300 pages during this time. Also, I'm credited in the following texts:
  1. Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (aka Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality) by Sigmund Freud
  2. Democracy and Social Ethics by Jane Addams
  3. Dream Psychology by Sigmund Freud
One thing I haven't done yet is submit books to DP.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Announcing the Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon

Next month, December 20, 2006 will mark the tenth anniversary Carl Sagan's passing. In his honor, I am organizing a special memorial "blog-a-thon" among Sagan's fans throughout the blogosphere. If you're a Sagan fan with a blog, you can participate by posting something related to him on or near that date. Read or reread a Sagan book and review it; discuss cool things that you've done that's been influenced by him; pontificate on one of the many topics he treated (SETI, astronomy, critical thinking, the history of science, human intelligence....), or post about something completely surprising. Contact me by email or by leaving a comment, and then when the date approaches, I will create a meta-post that links to all the stuff people are doing, providing a network of the participating bloggers. A list of Sagan stuff online that may be a source of ideas. Carl's son Nick Sagan on the blog-a-thon . Publicity for the blog-a-thon includes Cornell Univer
Read more

AOL Hometown shutting down, and taking a bit of bronze with it

Well, with the announcement that AOL's Hometown service is shutting down by October 31, one of the truly old school web hosting sites from the early days of the Web, up there with GeoCities and Tripod, and all of the websites hosted at URLs "hometown.aol.com", "members.aol.com" and "users.aol.com", will be going the way of Xoom into the land of dead bits. The shutdown is pretty abrupt; the formal announcement was only posted on September 30, and according to it, if webmasters don't back up their website files by the 31st, they'll simply be gone. All Hometown pages have one of two prominently placed banners atop the pages announcing the shutdown, one of which says "AOL Hometown is Closing its Doors. Find out how to BACK UP AND SAVE YOUR FILES before we say goodbye for good." and the other stating that "A Blogger is Always Prepared. DON'T GET LEFT BEHIND. Learn how to BACK UP & SAVE YOUR INFORMATION now." (desp
Read more

Early animated feature "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" screening in NYC

On November 11 and November 15, the Museum of Modern Art will screen , with live piano accompaniment, one of the earliest animated features ever made (and made by one of the earliest female animators), Lotte Reiniger's 1926 Arabian Nights fantasy The Adventures of Prince Achmed . Reiniger made films by painstakingly animating intricate silhouette cutouts, and the results are gorgeous to behold. The screening is part of a series on film preservation, and so I assume it's a restored version; I haven't been able to find out exactly how (or if) this differs from the version that has been available on DVD for a while, but the runtime given is 8 minutes longer than the DVD's.
Read more