IMHO: The rotating rhino, meteor impact, and animated flowchart is totally unnecessary cruft that makes it look almost satirical. If this keeps up, in time, this "AAA effects" stuff is going to look like the 90s "under construction" banner gifs.
I mostly agree, I still read and enjoyed it but part of me kept snagging on the fx and wishing it was way way turned down.
The effects are comically bad. I see the inspiration in scrolling effects that the New York Times put together, but the NYT was never dumb enough to obscure the copy text. Form follows function, and the function of a web page is to be read, not to obscure what is to be read with some stupid effect that's supposed to remind one (I suppose) of a volcano's cloud obscuring one's vision. At least "under construction" banners didn't obtrude upon the copy text.
What's wrong with the 90s, we had great fun.
Maybe. But for now, for me, I find them amusing.
I loved it and it brought me joy.
>To make this kind of research accessible, I’m open-sourcing the workflow I created for this investigation as a small toolkit, Antiquity, enabling anyone with a question and a coding agent to conduct similar historical archival investigations.<p><a href="https://github.com/jessewaites/antiquity" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jessewaites/antiquity</a>
Very cool.<p>I'm working on a similar project for contemporary political opinion media. Every podcast, blog, oped, or show cut into little pieces with the structure, speaker, quotes and nouns pulled out and cross-referenced. I bring it up because I wonder if this kind of heavy-weight preprocessing is worth bringing to historical documents as well. It would be much more expensive, initially, but afterwards allows questions get answered even cheaper than they are in your current system. It may be worth collecting interested parties and co-investing in the structured parsing.<p>Also modern transcription and historical document scanning have a similar shaped problem - dealing with misspelled words and trying to infer their corrections from context.
>Also modern transcription and historical document scanning have a similar shaped problem - dealing with misspelled words and trying to infer their corrections from context. Very true in my case on similar problems, my major issue was OCR relics. Reasonable mispelled words say by an uneducated person, are not that much of an issue. For the OP VOC work most letters were written by educated scribes and less of a problem. Anything before 1650 had very
different calligraphy though.