digital archives Archives - Page 2 of 5 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Uncategorized

Might Makes Right (a bad book is good to find…)

May 3, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

Ragnar Redbeard’s infamous work, “Might is Right,” aka “The Survival of the Fittest, or the Philosophy of Power” (1896), has shown up at Archive.org. Those inclined to hate egoism should cherish this work, which has few—arguably none—of the pesky redeeming features so common in works by Stirner, Badcock, Walker, etc.

Tucker’s “Radical Review”

March 7, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur

A complete collection of Benjamin R. Tucker’s “Radical Review” is now available on Google Books. The searchable text is incomplete, but the page prints are better than those that I used to put together my archive of the magazine. With two sets to work from, the process of getting a fully searchable text archive—already well underway—should be accelerated considerably.

Missing pieces

August 18, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve been working on a collection of short biographies of radical figures, sort of an introductory miscellany, and had been translating Elisée Reclus’ “John Brown” to include there. Gallica has a rough, but readable scan of what appears to be a pamphlet version of the text. Now that I’ve translated it, it also appears to be an incomplete version. Some text, probably at least a few lines, is pretty clearly missing. Brown’s capture, trial and death seem to have disappeared between one line and the next. This looks like an “original” error, rather than a recent scanning error. It’s still […]

I need a technical assist

July 28, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve been pushing ahead with plans to equip one of my wikis for a group transcription/translation of Proudhon’s collected works. The tools developed at Wikisource are in many ways pretty slick, and it looks like they will be adaptable to all the needs of the project. My only problem is that they use the djvu format, and I am living in an all-Macintosh house at the moment. If there’s anyone out there who has the capability to do some pdf-to-djvu conversion for me, I can do the rest of the work to get the OCR work done and the raw […]

The unfinished business of Liberty, II

July 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Let’s do something big! A side thread, during a rather distracted week on the Proudhon seminar list, has involved the possibility of tackling the untranslated portions of Proudhon’s writings in a collaborative setting. I’ve bounced this notion off of a few friends and allies, without a lot of response, but having someone else suggest it reminds me how much I really want to get the job done. There are tools for Mediawiki that should make the two-step process of transcribing and then translating the works. The structure of a wiki ought to make it easy for the participants to also […]

And then I stumbled upon…

May 19, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

There are a certain number of volumes in almost every major library collection, with titles like “Philosophical Pamphlets,” or something equally vague, which contain collections of materials bound together, with more or less rhyme or reason. The digital collections, of course, have them too, though frequently with even less in the way of contextual material or metadata to identify them and their contents. Once in a while those volumes turn out to be gold mines. This weekend, while searching at the Internet Archive site (one of those before-I-log-out searches, a stab in the dark, because I hadn’t done it in […]

“Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle”

April 15, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

A lot of my work right now is sifting through archives, trying to gather together links to the works of various key socialist writers: Proudhon, Leroux, Colins, Considerant, Fourier, Briancourt, Ott, etc., etc. Some of the sifting is easy: all 47(!) volumes of the Oeuvres de Saint-Simon et d’Enfantin are available at Gallica. In other cases, it’s a matter of sorting through the rubble at Google Books. Of course, the difficulties involved mean that my searches have been a bit more inclusive than they might otherwise be, and that has paid some handsome dividends. For example: Les Révolutions du XIXe […]

Plans and Prospects

November 19, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

As many of you know, I’ll be relocating from Ohio to Oregon sometime in the late spring/early summer of 2008. Teaching work has dried up out here, so it seems like time to move. I’ll be close to my parents and to a number of friends from Ohio who moved out there. Even if I stay poor, there will be mountains in the background, which is a big consolation for a guy who’s been living on an ancient lake bed for eighteen years. All of this has, of course, meant a little shuffling of priorities. I have access to resources […]

William Beck’s “Money and Banking”

November 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Money and Banking, Or Their Nature and Effects Considered (Cincinnati, 1839), published, and presumably written, by William Beck, was one of the major sources of William B. Greene’s mutual bank writings. It has also been the most difficult one to access in its entirety, since the microfilm, which is relatively common, has a number of unreadable pages, thanks to an early era of sloppy reproduction. A quick look suggests that this is one that Google Books got right. One more piece in place for the critical edition of Equality and Mutual Banking (1850), which will be my top priority, once […]

Proudhon and Tucker get psychedelic!

November 14, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Wow, man! Tucker’s edition of Proudhon’s The Malthusians, in a very special digital edition. Google Books raises the Art of Screwing Up to the level of, well, ART.