Monday, August 18, 2008

Embarked on a Historic(al) Publishing Adventure

Sometimes fun turns out to be a lot of work.

I have always had an interest in History. In school, all my elective classes were history classes. I love that whole karmic one thing leads to another flow of events that brought us from there to here to who knows where next.

Of course, in my life, everything usually comes back to the web, and so it is with history. I recently discovered that the great science fiction writer, H.G. Wells, also wrote a marvelous tome of the history of the world, entitled (creatively) The Outline of History. I also discovered that, although the book is in the public domain, the only text of it available on the web is a sort of unfinished OCR scan. Being a history fan, and an H.G. Wells fan, and a web developer, I obviously could not let that stand.

And so I have begun a long term project to edit together a web version of the book. This mostly entails doing some cutting and pasting, and a whole lot of trips to Wikipedia to verify spellings of archaic terms and the names of obscure kings. At any rate, the publishing of The Outline of History, Online Edition has begun. One article at a time, I will be editing and posting the entire contents of the book. It's going to take months to get it all out, and the project is eating huge amounts of my spare time. But it's so much fun!

No comments: