As Twitter has been turned into a neo-fascist cesspit by its white-supremacist owner, I am no longer posting on the Statutes Project account there. Once I have done some tidying, I will be locking the account.
In its place, I have started accounts on two other social media networks. I will endeavour to keep these accounts in sync, manually at first, pending some sort of general social media app that can handle multiple systems.
You can find the Statutes Project on Mastodon, courtesy of Humanities Commons, at https://hcommons.social/@Statutes, and on Blue Sky at @statutes.bsky.social
Hi there,
I am curious, how can people go about helping you with the task of transcribing and checking the OCRred documents? That is if you would like volunteers to assist.
Thanks for your comment.
I should probably write a blog post on this, but the quick version is I felt that the OCR was so poor, and had so many repeated errors, that there was scope for automatic correction; and that human correction would be an extremely tedious, repetitive, and uninteresting task. Consequently I have been developing a simple script to check and correct OCRd text.
Crowd-sourcing corrections would also require a lot of committment and work: publicising the project, liasing with volunteers, setting up systems to manage it, and I felt I did not have the time to do that properly.
However, the WikiProject: UK Laws on Wikisource (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:WikiProject_UK_Law) has been getting more active recently, and is sorting out volumes of statutes to put into their system. The Statutes of the Realm (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:The_Statutes_of_the_Realm_Vol_1_(1101-1377).pdf) and Ruffehad’s Statutes At Large (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Ruffhead_-_The_Statutes_at_Large,_1763.djvu) sets are both there, for transcription and proofing.
I find Wikisource’s own OCR very poor, so have been pasting in my own corrected texts (which you can find on Github, eg for Ruffhead: https://github.com/Anterotesis/statutes/tree/master/Ruffhead). Being plain text they require making up, and Wikisoucre has a style guide here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index_talk:Ruffhead_-_The_Statutes_at_Large,_1763.djvu
And if you wish, you can fork my Github repositories, and correct the text using whatever method suits you. (I’ve also been playign with running some of this through LLMs, but haven’t got very far with that as yet.)
If you do any of these things, be sure to let me know.
John
On page “/collections/british-and-irish/proclamations/” it was said that “Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 2: The later Tudors, 1553 – 1587: not located online.”
A version can now be found on Web Archive at “details/tudorroyalprocla0002paul/page/n7/mode/2up”
Thanks very much. I’ve updated the Proclamations bibliography with that link