The Art of Natural Dressage

As I told you, wikisource is the cohoperative project to digitalize old books. As you know, digitalizing is a complex issue; its seps are:
- to take good scans of pages of books,
- to publish such images into the web
- to convert them back into text by OCR
- to proofread the OCR to fix any OCR mistake.

The last step is the harder one, since it means to read and fix very carefully the books, and to work inside well organized communities using specialized software. Wikisource offers the advantage of being very "open" and cohoperative, so any one can give its contribution with the support of a large, experienced community.

I found very useful to work in wikisource on horsemanship books, since "quis scribit, bis legit": "who writes, reads twice". If you are fixing a text, you "write it": and you read it very carefully. You'll not forget any more any word of it.

France was the "High Scool country" for centuries, and I'm proud to tell you that I am working with French wikisource friends to upload into their project some masterpieces:

* L'instruction du Roy en l'exercice de monter à cheval , by Antoine de Pluvinel
* Ecole de Cavalerie, Tome premiere, by F. Robichon de La Guérinière
* Ecole de Cavalerie, Tome second by F. Robichon de La Guérinière
* Mèthode et invention nouvelle dans l'art de dresser les chevaux by William Cavendish, the Duke of Newcastle.

Is any of you interested to work into Franch wikisource about those books (or any other interesting, old book)? If some of you are, simply go to http://fr.wikisource.org and take a look.... and don't forget the wiki suggestion: "Be bold".

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Alex

I went a step forward, I upload the book of W. Cavendish (the Duke of Newcastle) into fr.source here:

http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Livre:Cavendish.djvu

Would you like to have a try? if you do, simply follow the link, then there follow the "red link" to any page of the book, then... perhaps your personal wikisource proofreading adventure will start.

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Alex

My French is almost gone, so proof-reading is not really an option for me... but what I noticed when I was skimming through the first pages of the text is this: you used 'f' in many places when actually it's an 's'. I don't know if you have this in Italian too, but in German - and apparently in French - there was this old letter for s which looked similar to an f. If you look closely, you can see the difference even in the way it is printed, but you can also see from the context that those words make no sense with an f or are no words at all, like 'jeuneffe', 'fouvent' et 'vifites', whereas with s they are just fine.

But wow, it's absolutely great that you did this! So wonderful that people can read those old books now!

Yes Romy, you're right! the book is really ancient, and it uses old style, medioeval s characters: Å¿ that obviusly are not catched by OCR software, resulting as f. Only the human eye (and the human understanding of text meaning) allows to fix such OCR mistake. This is precisely why "digitalization" of old books need human work: it's a three step work:
1. to obtain scans of pages
2. to have an excellent OCR from images of scanned pages
3. to edit and fix resulting OCR text

and the third step is the harder one. Wikisource offers a comfortable, cohoperative environment to take that third step, and my efford is to upload into wikisource old equestrian books, since equitation is much more an art than a science, and you can find something good (and something bad) into the most ancient from them, just as you can find something good (and something bad ), into the most modern ones.

You're German, Romy, if I remember well... ok, there's just waiting into the list of books to upload the work of Antoine de Pluvinel: L'instruction du Roy en l'exercice de monter à cheval (1629) with French and German front-versions. So far, it is waiting for upload in Internet Archive, here:
http://www.archive.org/details/Linstruc ... nterCheval
I'll let you know as soon as it will be uploaded into wikisource.

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Alex

Ok Romy, the bilingual German-French book of de Pluvinel is online into fr.wikisource!
De Pluvinel - L'instruction du Roy en l'exercice de monter à cheval, 1629

As you see from "Livre" page, all links to pages are red (this means that they are "empty" so far). As you follow the link, you "create" the page and the OCR text will appear ready to be edited and fixed. You'll find German text (corrisponding to left column of the bilingual page) at top, then the French text. My suggestion is to push the button, you'll read original text much better. As soon as you are satisfied or tired.... save you edit. Be bold! Try and learn! Wikisource people use mainly a R+ approach to teach beginners.

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Alex

Update!

The new URL of the book of Duke of Newcastle is:
http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Livre:Cav ... _1737.djvu

Take a look to:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categ ... vaux,_1737
You'll find the collection of eccellent,and very famous, equestrian engravings that are contained in the book. They have been uploaded to a very, very high resolution (more than 6000x4000 pixel), so that you can download any of them and print a poster! 6000 pixel, at 300 pixel/inch, are 20 inches... but I guess that you can print much larger images without any visible derangement of the image.

Here one of them (a "thumbnail" of 800 pixels):

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Alex

OH! OH! Thank you for this Alex!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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"Ride reverently, as if each step is the axis on which the earth revolves"

Awesome!!!

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www.equusuniversalis.com

The art! The art! I will decorate my walls and every time I look at them I will smugly say to myself, "you never needed a bit for any of this".!!!!! But the engravings are historical and stunning. I'm in classical heaven!!!

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"Ride reverently, as if each step is the axis on which the earth revolves"