Gutenberg, Fitzroy, Franklin

I only recently found out that the proofreading activity for old, out-of-copyright works intended for Project Gutenberg was an organised, distributed activity that for the past few years has been carried out (by volunteers) using the web app set up at PGDP. Out of curiosity I signed up, and over the last few weeks have done a couple hundred pages of 'P1' level proofreading (which basically amounts to correcting OCR errors before they're passed on to 'P2' for another pass to catch any that were missed).

There are so many projects on the go at any one time that I've found it very easy to choose those that I think look interesting. Since you end up taking pages out of a pool while other people are often doing the same, you aren't guaranteed consecutive pages, so the process doesn't always lend itself to following the narrative of a book (proofreaders are primarily there to correct errors, after all). But reading sections is still quite interesting, and I've resolved to read a couple of books for real when they show up on Gutenberg in a few months, fully proofread and formatted and complete.

After a tutorial project, the first project I decided to work on was the account of Captain Robert Fitzroy, Charles Darwin's ship's captain. The sections of the book I was proofreading were accounts of voyages before Darwin had joined the crew, but were no less interesting for it. At one point I felt a pang of recognition and, after some searching, realised that I was proofreading the original accounts of the capture of these Patagonian natives, which I had read about in the linked BBC article a couple of months before.

I've now moved on to Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, a new project added to the site yesterday to commemorate Franklin's 300th birthday (and already almost fully P1-proofread). Franklin was a smart man of many talents (and by today's standards, a total geek, in the most complimentary sense of the word) and his autobiography is fascinating throughout -- sometimes so much so that I forget I'm supposed to be correcting errors -- but my favourite passage so far is this one where the young Franklin struggles with his vegetarianism:

I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalm'd off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion I consider'd, with my master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc'd some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I din'd upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

215 years dead and his personality still oozes off the page and inhabits the room. Amazing.