Show HN: Liber Brunoniana – Hacking a Better Encyclopedia

liber-brunoniana.github.io

23 points·jswrenn··5 comments

I haven't had much time to study history since I started a CS grad program, so this side project was my way of scratching that itch. It far exceeded expectations, and University Archives has expressed interest in making it the official distribution of Encyclopedia Brunoniana.

There's a technical write-up of the project covering everything from processing, compilation, and design. [1] This iteration of Stiki, the static wiki generator powering Liber Brunoniana, is mostly written in Bash, but a past version was written in Racket (with article authoring in markdown) and I'm looking at extending Pollen for the next iteration with deeper version control integration.

[1] http://liber-brunoniana.github.io/Articles/Liber%20Brunonian...

This is cool.

As a Brown alum: this is really really really cool. Thank you for sharing.

PhD'04 here (from Charniak's NLP research group), and likewise.

Which research group are you in? Is the NLP work tied to your research, or is this entirely a side thing?

Thanks! PhD in the PLT group; I still know virtually nothing about NLP. In fact, if this had been an NLP project from the get-go, I probably wouldn't have started it.

This project began with me creating wiki software for the campus history interest group I run, realizing that a wiki with no content was _very_ lonely, and importing Encyclopedia Brunoniana as a remedy. From there, it was hard to resist the temptation to try to structure the documents. I threw an hour at it or so every Friday night.

Why your logo/header have to be 3MB?

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