Project page: Mormon Digitization Project

Brief recap: the goal is to find pre-1923 Mormon books (out of copyright), scan them, OCR them, clean up the OCRed text, and release the plain text files on Project Gutenberg (along with ePub editions, possibly PDFs, and possibly Lulu editions as well).

I’m starting with John A. Widtsoe’s book Joseph Smith As Scientist and will go from there. If you have any suggestions/requests, leave them in the comments (or email them to me). If I get enough people helping out, we’ll be able to tackle a few books at a time.

Process-wise, I’m thinking about trying Bite-Size Edits for at least part of the cleanup. There’s also a remote possibility I’ll use PGDP, but I really, really don’t like their interface. Right now I’m planning to track things using email and a Google Spreadsheet. (If I had more time I’d write a web app to manage it all for me, but Beyond is getting the bulk of my coding time.)

Yes, this will be kind of similar to the Mormon Documentation Project, but they don’t seem to be doing the types of books we’ll be doing. (I did use their text for the Standard Works web app and for this D&C reader’s edition I’m still working on, though. Good stuff.)

Want to help out? Email me (ben dot crowder at gmail) and I’ll add you to the list.

Caveat: Eucalyptus can only read books from Project Gutenberg. But that’s not really a problem for me, since most of what I wanted to read was on there anyway. (Well, most of what I wanted to read that already happened to be free.)

Fast forward to this morning. I’m Mormon, and I want to read more Mormon-related texts. I searched around on Project Gutenberg but only found six or seven books — the Book of Mormon (of course), James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ and The Story of Mormonism, and then some outsider and/or anti works. Hardly anything.

I want to change that.

There are lots of public domain (pre-1923) texts related to the Church which would be valuable to make available for free, so my new goal is to start digitizing them and putting them into Project Gutenberg. (So I can read them in Eucalyptus. ;))

Yes, yes, I’m aware that there are already places like GospeLink with plenty of these texts. That’s great, but I want Mormon books in Project Gutenberg, and so far that hasn’t really happened. It’s been seven years since I submitted The Story of Mormonism to Project Gutenberg, and the number of Mormon-related texts added since then (if any) is paltry at best.

I’m going to start building a list of the books I think should be added, and if you have any additions, let me know. (The only real stipulation is that there has to be at least one edition of the book published before 1923, to ensure that it’s out of copyright.) First on my list is John A. Widtsoe’s Joseph Smith As Scientist. I also plan to add the D&C, Pearl of Great Price, and eventually the Journal of Discourses.

I’ll also be developing my Unbindery web app as part of this, and I’ll need volunteers to help with proofreading. When that part is ready, I’ll let you know, but if any of you do want to help out, shoot me an email and I’ll add you to the list.

Last but not least: I like naming things, mainly so I have a way to talk about them. To that end, then, I’m going to call this the Mormon Digitization Project. Here we go. :)

Now that I’ve actually gotten something up, I’ll start work on Pride & Prejudice. And I’ll dig up the Thai script card I made in the mission office and upload it, too…

[tags]Martin Luther, 95 Theses, Latin, Pride & Prejudice, Thai[/tags]

I’ve started my first project for Riverglen Press: Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, in Latin. It’ll be a learner’s edition, for printing out and translating. I’m working off the Project Gutenberg text. Right now I’m in a bit of a rush, but here’s a tentative layout I threw together in Illustrator (subject to change, of course): 95 Theses. Next week sometime I’ll finish it up in InDesign. (I imagine it won’t take too long.)

[tags]Martin Luther, 95 Theses, Latin[/tags]

[tags]bookmaking, Book of Mormon, Thai, พรัคัมภีร์มอรมอน, มอรมอน, InDesign, Project Gutenberg, eBooks, XML[/tags]

[tags]classics, Perl, Project Gutenberg, InDesign, Pride and Prejudice[/tags]

Now that I’m done, it’s time to move to my next project: the Project Gutenberg eBooks. I’ve got to balance my time between this and Beyond, though. And yet I don’t think it’ll be much of a problem — these texts won’t be too hard to set. Eventually I want to set Middle English and Old English and Latin and Coptic texts (and texts in other languages, too), perhaps learner’s editions that people can print out and take notes on (wide margins, lots of space between lines, etc.). I’m even thinking that I may do a Bible someay, just because all the old printers did them. :)

[tags]bookmaking, Project Gutenberg, Bible[/tags]

As for my Project Gutenberg typesetting project, I think I’m going to call it Quire Press. (From Answers.com, a quire is “A collection of leaves of parchment or paper, folded one within the other, in a manuscript or book.”) I came up with a preliminary regular expression in vim to fix the lines (%s/\n([A-Za-z])/\1/g) but it’s not quite perfect yet. (And besides, I want to do it in Perl.) Pride and Prejudice will be the first book I produce and Phantastes (George MacDonald) will be the second.

[tags]bookmaking, Project Gutenberg, Pride and Prejudice, Phantastes, George MacDonald, Perl[/tags]

So, the process will go something like this: take a PG text (I’m going to start with Pride & Prejudice), run it through Perl to prepare it for entering into InDesign, and then design it in InDesign. I’ll produce two editions of each book: one for onscreen viewing (pages in sequential order), and one for printing (I just discovered InBooklet, which will let me do the impositions so the pages get printed where they need to be). I thought about designing each book differently, and that’s still a possibility, but I think this’ll be more of a “Modern Library” kind of thing (all in a set). Time to come up with a name for this new virtual press… Oh, and these will be downloadable for free, of course. I don’t care about money at all. (Which is why I’ll be poor till the end of my days, of course, but at least I’ll be happy.)

As for selection of texts, like I said, I’ll start with Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. From there I think I’ll move to lesser known texts, however. My second book will be George MacDonald’s Phantastes, and I’ll probably continue on with some of his other books (The Princess and the Goblin, etc.). I’d also like to do some foreign-language editions — Old English, Coptic, Latin, stuff like that. But that will have to wait. :)

[tags]bookmaking, Project Gutenberg, InDesign, Perl, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, George MacDonald, Phantastes[/tags]

[tags]bookmaking, Project Gutenberg, classics, PDF[/tags]