I’ve written before about the absolutely wonderful Project Gutenberg, which provides free electronic copies of 18,000 books that are out of copyright. So, for example, if you have a desire to read the complete Sherlock Holmes in the original, with illustrations, it’s all right here for you to enjoy.
The technologically savvy among you might wonder how these century-old (in some cases, millennia-old) works came to be available in electronic format; the answer is, through the magic of optical character recognition and lots of proofreading by dedicated volunteers.
Turns out, there’s a great system for people who want to dabble in such volunteerism. It’s called Distributed Proofreaders, and you can be one of the worker bees. There are a number of ways to get involved, but at its simplest: find a book you’re interested in, ask for a page, edit the OCR text against the scanned image (both of which appear in a convenient web page), and submit your edits. Simple and easy.
In terms of bang for the buck, this is about the best activism around; spend 15 minutes proofing a page, and after you’re done you’ll have played a part in making this book available forever. Tens of thousands of people might someday benefit from your work, which you can do in your bathrobe. Hard to beat that math.
Just by way of example, here are the books I worked on today:
- A Depression-era oral history of former slaves in Texas
- A turn-of-the-century history of the US Navy
- An 1860 work compiling pro-slavery arguments
- Transcripts of the hearings of the Warren Commission
- An anthology of great literature (I got a page from Don Quixote)
- Two encyclopedias
Check out one of the footnotes I found today; this is from a British encylopedia discussing World War I at a time when no one thought it would ever need a number:
[1] The use of gas, as already pointed out, had been forced on the British by its adoption by the Germans. Ultimately the methods invented by British chemists and physicists outgassed the Germans.
I just love this phrasing: of course the only reason the British used poison gas was because the bad guys were just so darned evil about how they used theirs. But when they set their minds to it, of course they were better at it. I’m sure I’ll find similarly interesting quotes if I stick with the pro-slavery book.
Postscript: in case you’re wondering why you might find this interesting yourself (assuming we share the same interest in historical trivia), I have since edited a passage referring to “Bagdad” as a modern Turkish province; a history of Copenhagen; an entry for Copernicus; and I’m currently reviewing the life of Henry Coppée, Penn history and literature professor from 1855-1866, and the first president of Lehigh University. Maybe I’m weird, but I think this is damn cool.