Work on the Statutes project for January 2017:
0: OCRed two volumes of ‘The Statutes Of The Realm’, as digitized by Google. This is an important collection of legislation from Magna Charta to 1714, derived from close study of the original manuscripts, and contains laws not found in other collections. Raw OCR can be found on Github, and be warned, it’s very raw, as this series goes to great lengths to transcribe the original texts, with all their irregularities and without softening them for the modern eye. I hope to have more news concerning other volumes soon.
1: Tidying up of, and various corrections made to – by hand and by find-and-replace – the OCR of the Pickering and Ruffhead editions of The Statutes At Large. I needed to locate every use of the term ‘sanctuary’, so waded through the alphanumeric soup. Investigations into automatic correction are ongoing.
2: Added a bibliography for the digitized volumes of Ruffhead’s series of ‘The Statutes At Large.’ This gives the particular volumes I have OCRed, each with their own idiosyncracies and missing pages. Also added a bibliography for historic French statutes up to the revolution of 1789, though I have no plans to do anything with these right now.
3: Added to the statutes collected from round the web:
The Quartering Act 1774
1849: 12 & 13 Victoria c.92: Cruelty to Animals Act
The Debtors Act 1869