On 03 January 2017 at 14:44 John Levin <anterotesis(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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.

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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk