Monthly Archives: September 2017

Updates, August and September 2017

The last two months have seen: continuing automated correction of the OCR-generated text of Pickering’s Statutes At Large, and some of the Butterworths-published volumes (1807 to 1819, in other words those using the ‘long s‘). The bash script I have written for this is improving, and I hope to release it soon on github (under a free license of course).

A side effect of hunting down erroneous OCR is the production of lists of such mistranscriptions. I have started to put those on Github; used with the forthcoming script this will constitute an easy way of improving raw OCR of eighteenth century books.

I have started a page collecting volumes of historic American state legislation, mainly colonial, but with some post-revolutionary laws.

SSL has been enabled for the site, courtesy of a free certificate via my hosts Evohosting and Let’s Encrypt! I will be making all URLs secure by default at some point in the future; this should not break any pages you have bookmarked. Until then, simply starting any them with ‘https://’ will call up the secure advise

New laws added to the site, including: the 1807 Abolition of Slavery Act; from 1740, encouragement of mariners; and Hogarth’s act for protecting copyright in engravings of 1735.

There will now be a hiatus until November, whilst I concentrate upon writing my PhD thesis.