A little while ago I posted some ideas for a project called OpenPhilosophy.org, which would enable users to transcribe, translate, annotate and create collections of philosophical texts which have entered the public domain. I’m very excited to say that the project has secured some funding from JISC, who champion digital technology for use in higher [...]
Category Archives: projects
Let’s make OpenPhilosophy.org!
Also posted in bibliography, digital, humanities, ideas, open data, openknowledge, philosophy, publicdomain, technology 1 Comment
TEXTUS: an open source platform for working with collections of texts and metadata
Since finally blogging about OpenPhilosophy.org last month I’ve been thinking about how one could make a generic open source platform that could be used to power it, and other things like it. Enter ‘TEXTUS’: TEXTUS is an open source platform for working with collections of texts and metadata. It enables users to transcribe, translate, and [...]
Also posted in bibliography, digital, history, humanities, ideas, literature, notes, open data, openknowledge, publicdomain, technology 6 Comments
Picturing processes
There has been lots of wonderful work to represent numbers in pictorial form. Pictures can help to show us how big things are, how much of something there is, how much one thing is compared to another, how amounts change over time, and so on. We can use interactive graphics to represent quantitative data on [...]
Also posted in digital, ideas, isotype, neurath, open data, policy, visualisation 2 Comments
Ideas for OpenPhilosophy.org
For several years I’ve been meaning to start OpenPhilosophy.org, which would be a collection of open resources related to philosophy for use in teaching and research. There would be a focus on the history of philosophy, particularly on primary texts that have entered the public domain, and on structured data about philosophical texts. The project [...]
Also posted in bibliography, history, humanities, ideas, intellectualhistory, openknowledge, philosophy, publicdomain, technology 6 Comments
A translation fund for public domain texts
If a text is widely known and published more than a century and a half ago, chances are that it will be freely available on the web to read and download. Every person with an internet connection has access to a vast wealth of cultural and historical material: novels and poems, essays and manifestos, constitutions [...]
Also posted in ideas, openknowledge, publicdomain 3 Comments
Who read what? Mapping influence in intellectual history
In my research I often wonder about whom and what the people I’m reading read. Did Wittgenstein read Nietzsche? Did Nietzsche read Hegel? Did Hegel read Shakespeare? Did Shakespeare read Chaucer? Did Chaucer read Sophocles? Knowing which texts a given writer was aware of (and which they probably weren’t aware of) can help us to [...]
Also posted in bibliography, digital, history, humanities, ideas, intellectualhistory, open data, openknowledge, philosophy, technology 7 Comments
Visualising Europe’s Energy
For the last two weeks I’ve been working hard with some people at the Open Knowledge Foundation to make a new visual tool to make it easier to understand European energy. It was launched today to coincide with a big meeting on energy at the European Council in Brussels. You can find it here: http://energy.publicdata.eu/ [...]
Also posted in energy, environment, europe, ideas, open data, openknowledge, policy Leave a comment
The Public Domain Review is launched!
Back in October, I posted a note about the Public Domain Review, an idea for a web-based review site for public domain works. Now the Public Domain Review has just gone live, to coincide with Public Domain Day 2011: http://publicdomainreview.okfn.org The first post is on the works of Nathanael West, whose works enter the public [...]
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Historical Hooks: ‘X Hundred Years Ago Today, …’
Our daily lives are permeated by the past. Newspapers are full of commemorations of persons and occurrences we deem to be culturally and historically significant. Calendars are stuffed with births, deaths, battles, inventions, catastophes, riots, murders and miracles. “X hundred years ago today”, we are told, ships were sunk, saints were born, cures were found, [...]
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Introducing: The Public Domain Review
One of the great things about the public domain is that very nearly everything eventually falls into it. It is only a matter of time before every work — every opera, fresco, novella, tapestry, napkin scribble and lecture note — gracefully ascends into the big commons in the sky. While the amount of time it [...]
Also posted in ideas, openknowledge, publicdomain 4 Comments
Jonathan Gray 





























































