I didn’t do OCR myself, except for the topic index and to fill in a few gaps. I started from existing Wikisource text and then built a pipeline around that: cleaning (headers, hyphenation, etc.), detecting article boundaries, reconstructing sections, and linking things back to the original page images. Most of the effort went into rendering the complex layouts, and handling the cross-linking, not the initial ingestion.

Glad to go into more detail if you’re interested, but that’s the gist of it.

People asking for dataset access has definitely been one of the themes of this thread. I’m taking that seriously. If I do expose it, I’d want to do it in a form that preserves the structure and doesn't just dump plain text.

You get that mix of geography, history, and sometimes quite opinionated description all in one place, which makes them much more readable, in my view. My introduction to this version discusses this and other related matters: https://britannica11.org/about.html

The underlying text is public domain, but the structured version here is something I put together for the site. I haven’t released a bulk dataset yet.

If you end up experimenting with it, I’d love to hear how it turns out — and I’m still figuring out what structured access might look like.

I haven't tested the article search box on the article viewer in Firefox. I'll look into that as well.

Making the title linkable is a great idea and it will be implemented shortly. Thanks for catching all of this.

What I’ve built here is a structured edition — the parsing, reconstruction, linking, indexing, etc. I haven’t published a formal license for that yet.

For casual or small-scale use there’s no issue at all. For bulk use (e.g. dataset / training / redistribution), I’d prefer people get in touch so I can figure out a sensible way to support that.

That’s a great suggestion. A side-by-side text + page view would be very nice for exactly the reasons you mention (verifying the text and seeing the original layout). I haven’t built that yet, but I’ve considered it.

Also helpful to hear that the links to the scans weren’t immediately obvious — I should probably make them a bit clearer. This may also not be obvious, but you can click the vol:page links in the left margin and go directly to the scan of whatever page you're reading.

Thanks again.

Part of the motivation here was to bring that kind of exploration back, but with the original 1911 text and structure.