A great example of a cooperative volunteer project. I have benefitted much over the years from their efforts.
I wonder if they are incorporating AI in their workflows.
In 2019, I published online an anthology of writing from 19th- and early-20th-century books at the Internet Archive [1, 2]. I started with the IA’s OCR versions of the texts, but they were riddled with errors and I had to do extensive manual clean-up. I didn’t trust myself to catch all of the mistakes, so I ended up paying someone else to do an additional proofreading pass.
Over the past couple of years, I have done occasional experiments to see how well the current AI models could do such work. One of my test cases has been the 1821 novel Life in London by Pierce Egan [3]. It has complex text and page formatting, with extensive use of italics, small caps, footnotes, footnotes to footnotes (!), poetry, etc.
Earlier this year, I had Claude create a digital version of Life in London using Gemini 3.1 Pro through OpenRouter for the OCR, with further semantic checks by Sonnet 4.6. The results [4], while not good enough for Project Gutenberg, were still a big improvement over my tests a year earlier. I am guessing that it would be possible to get even closer to PG quality using more recent models.
I wonder if they are incorporating AI in their workflows.
In 2019, I published online an anthology of writing from 19th- and early-20th-century books at the Internet Archive [1, 2]. I started with the IA’s OCR versions of the texts, but they were riddled with errors and I had to do extensive manual clean-up. I didn’t trust myself to catch all of the mistakes, so I ended up paying someone else to do an additional proofreading pass.
Over the past couple of years, I have done occasional experiments to see how well the current AI models could do such work. One of my test cases has been the 1821 novel Life in London by Pierce Egan [3]. It has complex text and page formatting, with extensive use of italics, small caps, footnotes, footnotes to footnotes (!), poetry, etc.
Earlier this year, I had Claude create a digital version of Life in London using Gemini 3.1 Pro through OpenRouter for the OCR, with further semantic checks by Sonnet 4.6. The results [4], while not good enough for Project Gutenberg, were still a big improvement over my tests a year earlier. I am guessing that it would be possible to get even closer to PG quality using more recent models.
[1] https://www.gally.net/jatsi/index.html
[2] https://archive.org/details/japan-as-they-saw-it
[3] https://archive.org/details/cu31924090015722/page/n56/mode/1...
[4] https://tkgally.github.io/lifelondon/