Remember my Mormon Digitization Project? I recently renamed it the Mormon Texts Project, and we’re proud to (finally) release our first text on Project Gutenberg: Joseph Smith as Scientist, by John A. Widtsoe.
We’re currently working on Orson F. Whitney’s The Life of Heber C. Kimball (and we could certainly use some more help, so if you’re interested — mainly in proofreading and fixing typos — then email me).
Remember the Mormon Digitization Project I mentioned back in March? It’s still going, and I need more people to help out with proofing. More specifically, you’d be comparing the digitized text (about five pages at a time) to the original page scans and making sure everything is exactly as it appears in the image. If you love catching typos, this is right up your alley. No special software required. Email me if you’re interested. (Depending on how fast you are, it doesn’t take very long to proof five pages, by the way.)
As for MDP news, we’re almost done with Joseph Smith As Scientist and will be starting on The Life of Heber C. Kimball soon. If there’s a particular Church book you’d like to see digitized (and it was first published before 1923), let me know.
I’m resurrecting the Mormon Digitization Project, which I blogged about nine months ago and then abandoned while I went and got married. (I feel justified.)
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.
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.)
Not too long ago I downloaded Eucalyptus, a slick new ebook reader for the iPhone. I love it. I didn’t think anything could knock Stanza down from being king of the hill in my ebook-reading world, but Eucalyptus did it and with style.
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.