Oh the places you will go!

Hyper-linking authors, their works and mentions of other authors and works within these texts on Wikisource offers another level of engagement.

By way of example:

John Duncombe
(1622–1687) – English clergyman and writer

Mentions in his work The feminead: or, Female genius, 1751 the work of:

Martha Peckard
(1729–1805) – Poet, born Martha Ferrar.

• Ode to Cynthia (1758)

Transcribing these works allows for another level of engagement i.e. why did Duncombe choose to mention this particular poet and this particular poem?

In this way we can build an 18th century web; hyper-linking between authors as they pay tribute to each other and cite each other.

The What Links Here button on the left hand menu of an Author page on Wikisource shows the links to and from each author.

The author William Hazlitt is particularly well-linked on Wikisource and allows you to skip from one author to another as they mention one another. Journeying further down the Open Knowledge rabbit hole.

CASE STUDY – Gavin Willshaw, Digital Curator at the University of Edinburgh.

“One area we have worked on is Wikisource, Wikimedia’s online library of digitised, out-of-copyright texts.

We wanted to upload one of our out of copyright PhDs to see how the software works and also to understand whether it increases use and awareness of our collections. So we uploaded a thesis which ticked all our boxes: out of copyright, typed (so could be OCR-ed), not too long, notable author

Some Problems in Variation and Heredity by Thomas Jehu

Easy to use and item was fully OCR-ed and transcribed in one day. Transciption had to be validated by another individual.

Certainly increased awareness: views are about 20 times higher than downloads from our repository.”

The thesis has also been linked to from Thomas Jehu’s Wikipedia page, one click away.

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