Distributed Proofreaders
Encyclopedia
E-text
An e-text is, generally, any text-based information that is available in a digitally encoded human-readable format and read by electronic means, but more specifically it refers to files in the ASCII character encoding.E-text has the broad meaning of something electronic that represents words, a...
s for Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...
by allowing many people to work together in proofreading
Proofreading
Proofreading is the reading of a galley proof or computer monitor to detect and correct production-errors of text or art. Proofreaders are expected to be consistently accurate by default because they occupy the last stage of typographic production before publication.-Traditional method:A proof is...
drafts of e-texts for errors.
History
Distributed Proofreaders was founded by Charles Franks in 2000 as an independent site to assist Project Gutenberg. Distributed Proofreaders became an official Project Gutenberg site in 2002.On 8 November 2002, Distributed Proofreaders was slashdotted
Slashdot effect
The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting, occurs when a popular website links to a smaller site, causing a massive increase in traffic. This overloads the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily close. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic that results from...
, and more than 4,000 new members joined in one day, causing an influx of new proofreaders and software developers, which helped to greatly increase the quantity and quality of e-text production. Distributed Proofreaders posted their 5,000th text to Project Gutenberg in October 2004, in March 2007, the 10,000th DP-produced e-text was posted to Project Gutenberg, in May 2009, the 15,000th DP-produced e-text was posted to Project Gutenberg, and in April 2011, the 20,000th DP-produced e-text was posted to Project Gutenberg. DP-contributed e-texts comprised almost half of works in Project Gutenberg.
On 31 July, 2006, the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation was formed to provide Distributed Proofreaders with its own legal entity and not-for-profit
Non-profit organization
Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...
status. IRS
Internal Revenue Service
The Internal Revenue Service is the revenue service of the United States federal government. The agency is a bureau of the Department of the Treasury, and is under the immediate direction of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue...
approval of section 501(c)(3) status was granted retroactive to 7 April, 2006.
Proofreading process
Public domainPublic domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
works, typically books with expired copyright, are scanned by volunteers or culled from digitalization projects, and the images are run through optical character recognition
Optical character recognition
Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...
(OCR) software. Since OCR software is far from perfect, often a large number of errors appear in the resulting text. To correct them, pages are made available to volunteers via the Internet; the original page image and the recognized text appear side by side. This process thereby distributes the time-consuming error-correction process, akin to distributed computing
Distributed computing
Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...
.
Each page is proofread and formatted several times, and then a post-processor combines the pages and prepares the text for uploading to Project Gutenberg.
Besides custom software created to support the project, DP also runs a forum and a wiki for project coordinators and participants.
DP Europe
In January 2004, Distributed Proofreaders Europe started, hosted by Project RastkoProject Rastko
Project Rastko — Internet Library of Serb Culture is a non-profit and non-governmental publishing, cultural and educational project dedicated to Serb and Serb-related arts and humanities...
. This site has the ability to process text in Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
UTF-8
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
encoding. Books proofread are centered mainly on European culture, with a large proportion of non-English texts including Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu and many others. , DP Europe had produced over 480 e-texts.
The original DP is sometimes referred to as "DP International" by members of DP Europe. However, DP servers are located in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, and therefore works must be cleared by Project Gutenberg as being in the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
according to U.S. copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
law before they can be proofread and eventually published at DP.
DP Canada
On 1 December 2007, Distributed Proofreaders Canada launched to support the production of e-books for Project Gutenberg CanadaProject Gutenberg Canada
Project Gutenberg Canada began on Canada Day 2007. Canadian citizens can create e-texts and download many books that are not yet in the Public Domain of many other countries. Some authors whose complete works can now be made available are A. A...
and take advantage of shorter Canadian copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
terms. Although it was established by members of the original Distributed Proofreaders site, it is a separate entity. All of its projects are posted to Project Gutenberg Canada, which launched on Canada Day
Canada Day
Canada Day , formerly Dominion Day , is the national day of Canada, a federal statutory holiday celebrating the anniversary of the July 1, 1867, enactment of the British North America Act , which united three British colonies into a single country, called Canada, within the British Empire...
2007.
In addition to preserving Canadiana, DP Canada is notable because it is the first major effort to take advantage of Canada's copyright laws which may allow more works to be preserved. Like copyright law in many other countries, Canada has a "life plus 50" copyright term. This means that works by authors who died more than fifty years ago may be preserved in Canada, whereas in other parts of the world those works may not be distributed because they are still copyright.
Notable authors whose works may be preserved in Canada but not other parts of the world include A. A. Milne
A. A. Milne
Alan Alexander Milne was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various children's poems. Milne was a noted writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work.-Biography:A. A...
, Walter de la Mare
Walter de la Mare
Walter John de la Mare , OM CH was an English poet, short story writer and novelist, probably best remembered for his works for children and the poem "The Listeners"....
, Sheila Kaye-Smith
Sheila Kaye-Smith
Sheila Kaye-Smith was an English writer, known for her many novels set in the borderlands of Sussex and Kent in the English regional tradition...
and Amy Carmichael
Amy Carmichael
Amy Wilson Carmichael was a Protestant Christian missionary in India, who opened an orphanage and founded a mission in Dohnavur...
.
Milestones
| Milestone | Date | e-text | Link to Project Gutenberg |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000th | 19 Feb 2003 | Tales of St. Austin's, P. G. Wodehouse P. G. Wodehouse Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE was an English humorist, whose body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, poems, song lyrics, and numerous pieces of journalism. He enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years and his many writings continue to be... |
etext 6980 |
| 2,000th | 3 Sep 2003 | Hamlet — the 'Bad Quarto', William Shakespeare William Shakespeare William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"... |
etext 9077 |
| 3,000th | 14 Jan 2004 | The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton Robert Burton (scholar) Robert Burton was an English scholar at Oxford University, best known for the classic The Anatomy of Melancholy. He was also the incumbent of St Thomas the Martyr, Oxford, and of Segrave in Leicestershire.-Life:... |
etext 10800 |
| 4,000th | 6 Apr 2004 | Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras, Jules Verne Jules Verne Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days... |
etext 11927 |
| 5,000th | 24 Aug 2004 | A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, John William Cousin John William Cousin John William Cousin was a British writer, editor and biographer. He was one of six children born to William and Anne Ross Cousin, his mother being a noted hymn-writer, in Scotland... |
etext 13240 |
| 6,000th | 2 Feb 2005 | The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, Sir Walter Scott | etext 14860 |
| 7,000th | 23 Jun 2005 | Opúsculos por Alexandre Herculano (Vol. I), Alexandre Herculano Alexandre Herculano Alexandre Herculano de Carvalho e Araújo , was a Portuguese novelist and historian.-Early life:... ; Viage al Parnaso, Miguel de Cervantes Miguel de Cervantes Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written... ; Leabhráin an Irisleabhair-III, Various. |
etext 16111 etext 16110 etext 16122 |
| 8,000th | 8 Feb 2006 | The Suppression of the African slave-trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, W. E. B. Du Bois | etext 17700 |
| 9,000th | 8 Sep 2006 | History of the World War for Human Rights, Kelly Miller Kelly Miller (scientist) Kelly Miller was an African American mathematician, sociologist, essayist, newspaper columnist, author, and an important figure in the intellectual life of black America for close to half a century.-Career:... ; Poems, Christina Rossetti Christina Rossetti Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems... ; Hey Diddle Diddle and Baby Bunting, Randolph Caldecott Randolph Caldecott Randolph Caldecott was a British artist and illustrator, born in Chester. The Caldecott Medal was named in his honor. He exercised his art chiefly in book illustrations. His abilities as an artist were promptly and generously recognized by the Royal Academy. Caldecott greatly influenced... |
etext 19179 etext 19188 etext 19177 |
| 10,000th | 9 Mar 2007 | (See list below) | |
| 11,000th | 12 Sep 2007 | Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943, Northern Nut Growers Association | etext 22587 |
| 12,000th | 26 Jan 2008 | Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis... |
etext 24429 |
| 13,000th | 24 Jun 2008 | A World of Girls, L. T. Meade | etext 25870 |
| 14,000th | 1 Dec 2008 | The Art of Stage Dancing, Ned Wayburn Ned Wayburn Ned Wayburn, born Edward Claudius Weyburn, was a choreographer. He was born in Pennsylvania but spent much of his childhood in Chicago where he was introduced to theater and studied classical piano. At the age of 21, he abandoned his family’s tradition of manufacturing and began teaching at the... |
etext 27367 |
| 15,000th | 12 May 2009 | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666, Various. Henry Oldenburg (editor) | etext 28758 |
| 16,000th | 1 Oct 2009 | ABC Petits Contes, Jules Lemaître Jules Lemaître François Élie Jules Lemaître , was a French critic and dramatist.He was born at Vennecy . He became a professor at the university of Grenoble, but was already well known for his literary criticism, and in 1884 he resigned his position to devote his time to literature... |
etext 30117 |
| 17,000th | 4 Mar 2010 | The Position of Woman in Primitive Society, C. Gasquoine Hartley | etext 31500 |
| 18,000th | 15 Jun 2010 | Area Handbook for Romania, Eugene K. Keefe, et al. | etext 32700 |
| 19,000th | 10 Nov 2010 | Vanden Vos Reinaerde Uitgegeven en Toegelicht (anonymous) | etext 34261 |
| 20,000th | 10 April 2011 | (See list below) |
10,000th E-book
On 9 March 2007, Distributed Proofreaders announced completing more than 10,000 titles. In celebration, a block of 15 titles was published:- Slave Narratives, Oklahoma (A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves) by the U.S. Work Projects Administration (English)
- Eighth annual report of the Bureau of ethnology. (1891 N 08 / 1886–1887) edited by John Wesley PowellJohn Wesley PowellJohn Wesley Powell was a U.S. soldier, geologist, explorer of the American West, and director of major scientific and cultural institutions...
(English) - R. Caldecott's First Collection of Pictures and Songs by Randolph CaldecottRandolph CaldecottRandolph Caldecott was a British artist and illustrator, born in Chester. The Caldecott Medal was named in his honor. He exercised his art chiefly in book illustrations. His abilities as an artist were promptly and generously recognized by the Royal Academy. Caldecott greatly influenced...
[Illustrator] (English) - Como atravessei Àfrica (Volume II) by Serpa Pinto (Portuguese)
- Triplanetary by E. E. "Doc" SmithE. E. SmithEdward Elmer Smith, Ph.D., also, E. E. Smith, E. E. "Doc" Smith, Doc Smith, "Skylark" Smith, and Ted was a food engineer and early science fiction author who wrote the Lensman series and the Skylark series, among others...
(English) - Heidi by Johanna SpyriJohanna SpyriJohanna Spyri was an author of children's stories, and is best known for her book Heidi. Born Johanna Louise Heusser in the rural area of Hirzel, Switzerland, as a child she spent several summers in the area around Chur in Graubünden, the setting she later would use in her novels.-Biography:In...
(English) - Heimatlos by Johanna Spyri (German)
- October 27, 1920 issue of PunchPunch (magazine)Punch, or the London Charivari was a British weekly magazine of humour and satire established in 1841 by Henry Mayhew and engraver Ebenezer Landells. Historically, it was most influential in the 1840s and 50s, when it helped to coin the term "cartoon" in its modern sense as a humorous illustration...
(English) - Sylva, or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees by John EvelynJohn EvelynJohn Evelyn was an English writer, gardener and diarist.Evelyn's diaries or Memoirs are largely contemporaneous with those of the other noted diarist of the time, Samuel Pepys, and cast considerable light on the art, culture and politics of the time John Evelyn (31 October 1620 – 27 February...
(English) - Encyclopedia of Needlework by Therese de Dillmont (English)
- The annals of the Cakchiquels by Francisco Ernantez Arana (fl.FloruitFloruit , abbreviated fl. , is a Latin verb meaning "flourished", denoting the period of time during which something was active...
1582), translated and edited by Daniel G. BrintonDaniel Garrison BrintonDaniel Garrison Brinton was an American archaeologist and ethnologist.-Biography:Brinton was born in Thornbury Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Yale University in 1858, Brinton studied at Jefferson Medical College for two years and spent the next travelling in Europe....
(1837–1899) (English with Central American Indian) - The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties (1921) by Richard Runciman TerryRichard Runciman TerrySir Richard Runciman Terry was an English organist, choir director and musicologist. He is noted for his pioneering revival of Tudor liturgical music. He is often credited as R. R. Terry or simply R...
(1864–1938) (English) - Le marchand de Venise by William ShakespeareWilliam ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
, translated by François GuizotFrançois GuizotFrançois Pierre Guillaume Guizot was a French historian, orator, and statesman. Guizot was a dominant figure in French politics prior to the Revolution of 1848, a conservative liberal who opposed the attempt by King Charles X to usurp legislative power, and worked to sustain a constitutional...
(French) - Agriculture for beginners, Rev. ed. by Charles William Burkett (English)
- Species Plantarum (Part 1) by Carolus LinnaeusCarolus LinnaeusCarl Linnaeus , also known after his ennoblement as , was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology...
(Carl von Linné) (Latin)
20,000th E-book
On April 10, 2011, the 20,000th book milestone was celebrated as a group release of bilingual books:- The Renaissance in Italy–Italian Literature, Vol 1, John Addington SymondsJohn Addington SymondsJohn Addington Symonds was an English poet and literary critic. Although he married and had a family, he was an early advocate of male love , which he believed could include pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships. He referred to it as l'amour de l'impossible...
(English with Italian) - Märchen und Erzählungen für Anfänger; erster Teil, H. A. GuerberH. A. GuerberHélène Adeline Guerber , better known as H.A. Guerber, was a British historian most well known for her written histories of ....
(German with English) - Gedichte und Sprüche, Walther von der VogelweideWalther von der VogelweideWalther von der Vogelweide is the most celebrated of the Middle High German lyric poets.-Life history:For all his fame, Walther's name is not found in contemporary records, with the exception of a solitary mention in the travelling accounts of Bishop Wolfger of Erla of the Passau diocese:...
(Middle High German (ca. 1050-1500) with German) - Studien und Plaudereien im Vaterland, Sigmon Martin Stern (German with English)
- Caos del Triperuno, Teofilo FolengoTeofilo FolengoTeofilo Folengo , who wrote under the pseudonym of Merlino Coccajo or Merlinus Coccaius, was one of the principal Italian macaronic poets.-Biography:...
(Italian with Latin) - Niederländische Volkslieder, Hoffmann von Fallersleben (German with Dutch)
- A “San Francisco”, Salvatore Di GiacomoSalvatore Di GiacomoSalvatore Di Giacomo was a Neapolitan poet, songwriter and playwright.Di Giacomo is credited as being one of those responsible for renewing Neapolitan dialect poetry at the beginning of the 20th century...
(Italian with Neapolitan) - O’ voto, Salvatore Di Giacomo (Italian with Neapolitan)
- De Latino sine Flexione & Principio de Permanentia, Giuseppe PeanoGiuseppe PeanoGiuseppe Peano was an Italian mathematician, whose work was of philosophical value. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much notation. The standard axiomatization of the natural numbers is named the Peano axioms in...
(1858-1932) (Latin with Latino sine Flexione) - Cappiddazzu paga tuttu—Nino Martoglio, Luigi PirandelloLuigi PirandelloLuigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written...
(Italian with Sicilian) - The International Auxiliary Language Esperanto, George Cox (English with Esperanto)
- Lusitania: canti popolari portoghesi, Ettore Toci (Italian with French)
External links
- Distributed Proofreaders
- Distributed Proofreaders software at SourceForgeSourceForgeSourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...
- Other sites using versions of DP software:
- Distributed Proofreaders Europe
- Distributed Proofreaders Canada
- GaGa.net (creates texts in German for Gutenberg-DE)
- DP Marefa المعرفة المخطوطات
- eBookForge.net
- Project Madurai
- Heironymus.sk