I’m stealing ShooBoo’s MeFi post, title and all (it means ‘Irishman in space’), because I can’t improve on it:
Manannán, written in 1940 by Máiréad Ní Ghráda is an Irish-language young adult sci-fi space travel book. It may contain the first use of a Mecha outside of Japan. And the first mention of a gravity assist in literature. A machine translation to English of the first 20 pages.
As a lover of both Irish and sf, I can only applaud. (That last link has responses from actual Irish speakers, e.g. “I suspect these are actually mistranscribed by the project. […] Comparing the transcription of the first chapter with the source in the PDF they’re missing a fada.”)
github seems like the wrong mechanism to get this published. Raising tickets and making pull requests to fix spellings? Too much like work. I mean literally.
I would suggest Wikisource instead, but the text is still in copyright since the author died a mere 55 years ago.
The source PDF is apparently at a box.com link from https://aonghus.eu/Manannan.html but it didn’t work for me
github seems like the wrong mechanism to get this published.
It seemed odd to me as well.
Perhaps still under copyright in dubious jurisdictions like Ireland and the U.S., but already in the public domain in various other countries. I believe there is or at least used to be a specifically-Australian branch of, um, maybe Project Gutenberg that took advantage of the fact that copyright term had been extended less lavishly in Australia than in certain other places.
https://gutenberg.ca/ includes grandfathered texts from before Canada’s 2023? switch from 50 to 70 years.
https://gutenberg.net.au/ had likewise relative to its 2005? switch but I guess they are all USPD by now.
https://www.fadedpage.com/ is also based in Canada.
Looks like Dave Curran was unsure how successful or legit the result would be. The advantage of the excessive bureaucracy for a collective text-improvement effort is that it carries citations/evidence alongside the edits; and that individual edits* can be reversed without losing later work.
* Or indeed all edits by some contributor if they’re deemed to be not contributing.
Fadedpage is the public side of https://www.pgdpcanada.net/ – they’re not entirely against taking on languages they can’t understand, but it might depend on whether Clo Gaelach can be reliably OCRed. They’ve done Fraktur…
Dave Curran also started a reddit thread on the project.
The box.com PDF of the full book scan.
A question distantly related to or at least prompted by paternoster elevators:
When I first worked in an election office, the million-plus voter registrations were kept in an entire wall of revolving columns of file drawers. If you needed to look for Malatesta, you went to the M column and pressed the button and the drawers in front of you would rise and disappear into the wall while new drawers emerged below, until the needed alphabetical segment was in front of you.
Is there a word for such a contraption?
We called it the Masterfile, but that was merely in opposition to the precinct books, which held duplicate copies ordered differently, by geography. If someone registered, you checked the Masterfile to see if there was a previous registration, noted the precinct number and went to the books to find the old one, remove it and record the voting history on the new card.
Ryan, I think you meant that for the Dumbwaiter thread, although I suppose you might well get an answer here. I have seen the kind of thing you describe but never learned the word for it.
@Ryan, PP: That’s the paternoster archive I mentioned in the other thread.
Ouch. Sorry to both CC and PP!