[open-humanities] First steps with OpenPhilosophy.org

Wed Dec 21 07:24:08 UTC 2011

On 12/21/2011 01:38 AM, Jonathan Gray wrote:

> I've taken some preliminary steps to get started with OpenPhilosophy.org.
>
> A very basic Wordpress site is now up here: http://openphilosophy.org/
>
> As it says on the site: "OpenPhilosophy.org is a collection of public
> domain philosophy texts that everyone is free to enjoy and share."

Could you spend a few words explaining why this project is needed?
To me it sounds like hiring a carpenter to develop a special kind of
bookshelf only for philosophy books. Certainly they are no different
from other books? What should be different is the analysis of their
content and authors, which is something I thought that Stanford's
encyclopedia of philosophy (and Wikipedia) already addressed?
http://plato.stanford.edu/

I'm the founder of Project Runeberg, the Scandinavian e-text archive,
which in 1992 was the first spin-off from Project Gutenberg. My
reasons at the time for starting my own project was to explore
Internet publishing and to expand outside of English literature,
which Project Gutenberg was then entirely focused on. Later I have
been asked to expand into German, Polish and other languages,
but refrained from doing so. (Instead I encouraged Wikisource to
introduce facsimile images for proofreading, which has been quite
successful.) I have also been asked to set up separate sites for
specific topics, but always thought that books are books and we
must benefit from not diluting volunteer efforts into separate
projects. That's why I want to know why you are setting up a
separate project for PD source texts in philosophy.

-- 
   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

   Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/