About This Corpus

Historical Encyclopaedia Britannica Digital Archive

The Corpus

This digital corpus contains OCR-processed text from seven editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica published between 1771 and 1860. The editions represent a remarkable evolution of human knowledge during the Enlightenment and early Industrial Revolution.

Editions Included

• 1st Edition (1771) - The original three-volume work published in Edinburgh
• 2nd Edition (1778-1783) - Expanded to ten volumes
• 4th Edition (1810) - Twenty volumes with supplement
• 5th Edition (1815) - Reprint with corrections
• 6th Edition (1823) - Twenty volumes
• 7th Edition (1842) - Twenty-one volumes plus index
• 8th Edition (1860) - Twenty-two volumes

Sources

The source PDF documents come from two collections:

• National Library of Scotland - Digitised Collections: Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Internet Archive - Historical book digitization project

Technical Details

Text extraction was performed using OLMoCR (Optical Layout Model OCR), a state-of-the-art vision-language model developed by the Allen Institute for AI. OLMoCR preserves document structure and provides character-level page number mapping, enabling precise provenance tracking for each article.

Usage

This corpus is provided for research and educational purposes. Individual articles can be downloaded in Markdown format for offline use.

Data Format

The underlying data is available in JSONL format with full provenance including:

• Edition year and name
• Volume number
• Page numbers (start and end)
• Article type (dictionary entry vs treatise)
• Word count

Acknowledgments

This project was made possible by the open data policies of the National Library of Scotland and the Internet Archive's commitment to universal access to knowledge.