Work on the Statutes Project in November 2016:

0: The big news is that the OCRing of the digitized volumes of statutes is now complete. That’s a total of 137 separate volumes. Quite how many words that is I haven’t checked yet, but the Danby Pickering series alone contains around 13 million words. There should be a more or less complete set of public acts from 1761 to 1875, 115 years worth of legislation in the volumes published contemporaneously. Before 1761, the statutes are incomplete as many acts that had either been repealed or had just expired were not included in the collections. The numbers missing are yet to be ascertained.

The raw OCR is available via github: https://github.com/Anterotesis/statutes

This stage complete, I now need to consider how best to correct the OCR and organize the texts. News on this next month.

1: Added the Riot Act of 1714 and the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 to the collection of miscellaneous statutes.

Work on the statutes project in October 2016:

0: Further OCRing of volumes of statutes. Current status is that the complete set of Danby Pickering’s Statutes At Large, from Magna Carta to 1806 have been put through the machine, as has what I’m calling the Butterworths series, spanning 1807 to 1839. Investigation of the avaiable digitized volumes of statutes suggest that there is a continuous series up until 1875, whereuon coverage gets very patchy. So for all intents and purpose, 1875 is the cut-off point for this project. Just another 35 years worth of statutes left to OCR!

1: Added two laws collected from around the internet:  The Witchcraft Act, 1735 and The Poor Law, 1601.

2: Added some volumes to the list of Scottish statutory resources, and started a page for Acts etc. for Burma / Myanmaar.

3: A visit to the V & A to see a perpetual motion machine that was not in motion. The promised post on the statute organizing its auction will be coming this month. Promise.

4:Discussion of getting the statutes on to Wikidata, with Andrew Gray.

5: What I’ve been reading (about law). Two short papers recommended by Law & History:

• Sandberg, Women’s Legal History: The Future of Legal History
• Harris, Is it Time for Non-Euro-American Legal History?

On the agenda for next month: the end, I hope, for the moment of the OCRing of the statutes, then some organizing and error correction of the resultant texts.

A regular report of updates to the Statutes Project.

0: Launched this site.

1: Links to digitized volumes of the Laws of Grenada, 1763 to 1875, added.

2: Volumes 31 and 32 of Danby Pickering’s edition of the Statutes uploaded to the Github repository.

3: All 6 volumes of Pickering’s edition so far OCR’d run through Ted Underwood’s OCR Normalizer. The text is still poor, but nevertheless considerably improved over what came straight out of Abbyy Finereader. Again, all to be found on Github.

4: Began posting the specific volumes I am using as sources for British legislation. Note that the particular scans I am using as sources are important, due to individual blemishes and stamps on the original volume, and technical distortions – not to mention stray fingers – of the digitization used.

Planned for October: more OCRing, more normalizing, some thinking about the titles of the statutes, and a very odd lottery.