digital archives Archives - Page 4 of 5 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

What Iain said!

July 31, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

In response to the news of the Liberty archive’s first-phase completion, my friend Iain commented, “now, if only someone could do that for Freedom between 1886 and 1926!” Amen! And for Mother Earth, and for any number of other important anarchist papers and journals. I’ve started to work up a text archive of the six issues of The Rebel (Boston, 1895-6), an anarchist-communist paper, which had a few Voltairine de Cleyre items in it, in part because it looked like a simple job, and because I wanted to look at something other than issues of Liberty and Woodhull and Claflin’s […]

Liberty archive: phase 1 complete!

July 22, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

It’s all there in the archive, all 411 issues of Liberty and Libertas. It’s a warts-and-all collection, with plenty of warts. So far, all I’ve proven is that an individual can produce a free archive almost as sketchy as the big commercial databases. (To really scramble things, however, seems to require much more capital than I have access to.) Now comes the fun part, figuring out what software to use for the more formal archive, continuing the transformation into a searchable text archive, and starting to make use of all this material that has been so hard to access. And […]

Liberty Site update

July 21, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

401 issues of Liberty and Libertas are now available in the archive. That leaves only 10 issues of Liberty to go! I should be able to complete this phase tomorrow. Next up: A more complete proposal for The Liberty Site—a rather ambitious scheme to answer, hopefully in the positive, the question: Can Liberty be the mother of order?

Proudhon at Google Books

July 16, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

As I mentioned in the last post, Google Books’ search engines do miraculous things sometimes, the sort of miraculous things that make finding anything an iffy proposition. I make no claims for the completeness of the list that follows. Finding what I did find was something of an adventure. However, I can happily announce that most of Proudhon’s major work is available, if not obviously so, on Google Books. Volumes undoubtedly lack pages, have text obscured by the fingers of workers, are blurred or bleed of the edge of the screen, but these are just the things we are learning […]

Google Books is hiding things again

July 13, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

More stupid search engine tricks. Back in May, I noted some peculiarities of Google Books’ search engines. If you follow the links from that original post, you will notice some new peculiarities, including the disappearance of the 1849 Amos E. senter edition of Equitable Commerce from the results for: inauthor:josiah inauthor:warren. That important edition is still available from Google Books; you can follow the link above to see what Equitable Commerce looked like before Stephen Pearl Andrews edited it. But it, and one other listing, no longer show up in a general search for Warren’s work. There are still five […]

Bits of Liberty’s History

July 12, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Labors of love are notoriously bad at paying the rent, and other work has been a little slow, so I’m digging into my personal archive a bit to keep a roof over my head while I work on the Josiah Warren book and Liberty archive. I was fortunate enough, some years ago, to pick up a lot of original issues of Liberty, along with a few related items: letterhead stationary from the Liberty offices and the portrait of Michael Bakunin which Tucker claimed was the first faithful likeness published in the United States. I have put one each of the […]

Reading around / Dyer D. Lum’s Alarm

July 9, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve been reading pretty broadly lately, pulling together articles related to the Liberty archive project and Utopia, OH, the Josiah Warren anthology. That’s taken me into the pages of The Egoist, where Benjamin Tucker, Bolton Hall, and Stephen Byington shared pages with the likes of Ezra Pound, and fairly familiar debates about the nature of egoism and anarchism appeared alongside early reviews of Italian Futurism. It’s also taken me into the pages of Max Nettlau’s 1897 Bibliographie de l’Anarchie, which I had never tackled before, and which has been full of pleasant surprises. A steady regimen of Proudhon translation has […]

Liberty Archive – update

June 26, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

The archive of Liberty is growing steadily. I passed the 1000-page mark today, which is about 1/3 of the run, in terms of actual pages; about 1/4 in terms of difficulty of scanning the material; and about 1/2 of the way in terms of the actual content of the paper. The response has been very encouraging. Wendy McElroy has offered her Index To Liberty as a means of wading into the archive in a more systematic manner, and it looks like we will be incorporating that index into the archive as it becomes more than just a pile of pdfs. […]

Left-libertarian archive task-force

June 25, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve just been contacted by a library student and market anarchist who is interested in joining forces on archiving public domain material from the market anarchist traditions. And I’m feeling like there is sufficient interest (based on the reception of the Lucifer and Liberty issues I have posted) to make some better organized and more accessible archive a present priority. A couple of folks here have expressed interest interest in helping with technical matters, hosting, scanning, kibitzing, etc. I’m probably going to set up a “task force” mailing list this weekend to start hashing out some kind of plan. If […]

Progress in archiving Liberty

June 25, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

Volumes 1-4 of Liberty and 3 of the 8 issues of Libertas are now available in pdf. The archiving push has brought some offers of assistance. I am hoping to launch a MediaWiki-based site for group discussion and collaborative transcription of the archived material. More news on this, and on indexing for the archive, soon.