Dear list,
As this is my first post to this list, an intro to start:
I am a student at Sussex, but live in London, writing a PhD on the
history of imprisonment for debt.
I've been doing minor edits and correction on wikipedia for about 4
years, and attended wikimania at the Barbican a few years back. My user
page is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Technolalia
My Phd has involved a lot of digging around for historic statutes, and
this has led to a side project, and one that I hope will work with
Wikipedia. In short, I have OCRd around 80 volumes of various editions
of the Statutes At Large and the Public General Statutes. They cover the
period from Magna Carta, up to 1875 (after which digitized volumes are
scarce). I believe they contain a more or less complete set of public
acts from about 1765 to 1875. Although it is obviously alphanumeric soup
at the moment, I am working on automatic correction of the more obvious
errors, and on producing decent metadata.
My aims are to make finding legislation easier, to make it easier to
examine, both by eye and by machine, and to produce reliable metadata
from and for it. My immediate priority is to extract the tables of
contents from the collections, and build a reliable list of acts with
regnal codes and full titles (correctly spelled).
My site for this project:
http://statutes.org.uk
and my github repo:
https://github.com/Anterotesis/statutes
Wikipedia has many useful lists of statutes, some entries on particular
acts, & in wikicommons a few of the texts. I very much want my work to
contribute to wikipedia and improve this aspect of it. I've been talking
with Andrew Gray, mainly with regard to Wikidata, but such is the size
of the task I think more hands will be needed. & of course I don't want
to start making great changes without consultation.
As empire spread English common law around the world, there are many
international aspects to this as well, not least the number of British
statutes concerned with other countries. To this end I've been
collecting sources of Anglophone common law, eg for Barbados:
http://statutes.org.uk/site/collections/international/barbados-law/
& Jamaica:
http://statutes.org.uk/site/collections/international/jamaican-law/
And also OCR'd a set of volumes of Irish statutes to 1800:
https://github.com/Anterotesis/statutes/tree/master/Ireland
(Raw OCR, no auto correction carried out)
I'd very much like to see wikipedia develop this legal history as well,
but for my part I have enough to do with the British acts.
I hope this is of interest to you,
John
--
John Levin
http://www.anterotesis.com
http://twitter.com/anterotesis