One of next things we want to do for open shakespeare is provide an open
introduction for to his works. The obvious idea for this was to use the
Shakespeare entry in the 11th ed of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as
detailed in this ticket:
http://p.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/trac/ticket/24
We’ve now written code to grab the relevant tiffs off wikimedia:
http://p.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/svn/trunk/src/shakespeare/src/eb.py
You can also find them online (28 pages) starting at:
Next step is to then OCR this stuff (after that we can move on to
proofing whether by ourselves or via http://pgdp.net). When we first had
a stab at this back in April we tried using gocr. Unfortunately the
results were so bad that they were unusable. Recently an old ocr engine
of HP’s has been released as open source under the name of tesseract:
http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
We’re going to have a go using this — though if there is anyone out there with access to an alternative system we’d love to hear about it.
Rufus Pollock is Founder and President of Open Knowledge.
