Lessons taught; Lessons learnt

My earlier post on Robert Recorde’s Whetstone of Witte, focusing on the first appearance of the equals sign, has inspired me to restart work on a project I first started almost four years ago: to make the Whetstone of Witte available online.

The first (and easiest) stage is to scan a text, and make the scans available. I have had unprocessed scans (from a 1969 reprint of the 1557 original) on my computer for quite a while; I have now processed them, and made them available on archive.org.

The more challenging task is to create a transcription of this text, which can be searched and edited. With more modern texts it is a fairly simple task to create a ‘digital text’: simply use an OCR package like ABBYY Finereader to read through the text. OCR packages, however, do not generally like the gothic script used in the 16th century — if you want a laugh, take a look at the OCRed text available on that archive.org page! There are some (very expensive) tools which can OCR this type of font, but it is most practical, for me, to do it by hand.

Even beyond the challenge of the font, this book presents some additional difficulties. As a maths book with non-standard notation, I have to ponder how best to transcribe pages like this:

Be sure to click on it to see the page in its full majesty!

I will be solving these problems as I go. I am slowly working through the book, as I have time. You can see my current progress in this section of the site, where I will be uploading my work as it progresses.

Related Posts (automatically generated)

1. Maths history: Robert Recorde’s Whetstone of Witte