[open-humanities] 18th-century texts online accessible

[John Levin]

On 28/04/2011 10:59, Rufus Pollock wrote:
> On 27 April 2011 18:20, John Levin<john at anterotesis.com>  wrote:
>> On 26/04/2011 14:55, Rufus Pollock wrote:
>>>
>>> On 26 April 2011 14:53, Philippe Aigrain
>>> <philippe.aigrain at sopinspace.com>    wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I confirm: this is a close consortium collaborative effort with no
>>>> public access at this time, and even extrapolating, one can fear that
>>>> the future public access will be limited to the surface (an interactive
>>>> presentation of the laid out text) and no open access for the sources
>>>> (the TEI XML encoded text and the layout software).
>>>>
>>>> This has in my opinion to be checked before it can be endorsed by
>>>> OKF/CKAN, no ?
>>>
>>> Given the update on the license this wouldn't be a project that would
>>> be directly endorsed by the OKF since the material isn't open. That
>>> doesn't mean it couldn't be registered on http://ckan.net/ as that can
>>> include material that while not yet open could be open etc. At the
>>> same time I think it is nice to hear of a project making steps towards
>>> open if they haven't got there yet!
>>>
>>
>> Latest news is this statement:
>> http://textcreate.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/what-the-public-release-of-ecco-tcp-texts-means-for-you-now-and-in-the-future/
>>
>> (Plain) texts are available via email, and will be available under a CC PDM
>> license.
>
> Great news.
>
>> So they could be registered on CKAN, I suppose.
>> It really strikes me as odd that you have to email for the texts; surely
>> they have the resources at least to put a zip file or suchlike online. Would
>> OKF be willing to host them?
>
> Yes -- this would be done via CKAN so creating a 'package' for them
> now with some of the info we've gleaned would be first step.
>
> Rufus
>

I now have access to these files, all 2,188 of them, 140mb zipped; 
they're distributed by Dropbox rather than email. They're plain text, 
don't come with a license file, but according to
http://textcreate.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/what-the-public-release-of-ecco-tcp-texts-means-for-you-now-and-in-the-future/
a CC Public Domain Mark will be added. (Actually, the url above is 
slightly ambiguous. There's another set of files, marked up in sgml/xml, 
and those might be CC PDMed.)

I've created a ckan package here:
http://ckan.net/package/tcp-ecco-18th-century-texts
rather skimpy, not quite sure what to put in some of the fields. My 
first CKAN package!

So, what are the next steps? I think it necessary to release the files 
publicly, but don't have the resources to provide a home for them. Can 
anyone help me with this? Also, if that will take some time and 
organization, I'd really like to get the contents list (provided in .xls 
format) out, so people can see what's in the package. I can easily do a 
blog post for this - what format/s do people think I should put the file 
out as? I'll do an HTML page, but would like the file to be downloadable 
as well. CSV, anything else? .ods?

And what else should be done with this material?

John

-- 
John Levin
http://www.anterotesis.com
johnlevin at joindiaspora.com
http://twitter.com/anterotesis