About

Objective

The Knowledge Project uses historic editions of Encyclopedia Britannica to build an extensive, open digital collection for studying the form of nineteenth-century knowledge and to examine its transformation over time. The effort is headed by Dr. Peter M. Logan, Temple University, with support from the Duckworth Scholars Studio of Temple University Libraries and the Metadata Research Center at Drexel University.

The different editions of the Britannica are the most comprehensive representation extant of what constituted "official" knowledge in the nineteenth century. Those editions also demonstrate changes over time in the nature of knowledge in the English-speaking world. The Knowledge Project is creating the first accurate, standards-compliant textual data set for this corpus.

We extend the data set's usability by applying innovative methods to automatically generate metadata for each of the approximately 100,000 entries, which are indexed with current and historical subject categories. All of the data is being made freely available, as it is ready, and a series of analyses are planned to identify the feasibility of tracking concept drift across time within the corpus.

Contact us

For further information, please email nckp@temple.edu.

Acknowledgements

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.