How to start up the Collation Project pilot
From Textop Wiki
First, bear in mind that the organization of and planning for Textop should not wait for this pilot project. It will proceed and be refined as pilot project participants gain essential practical knowledge of the issues involved in setting up the Collation Project on a large scale.
The pilot project need not be perfect: it should "push" people to understand the challenges of this sort of project. But it should also be tractable, or a priori feasible. For that reason, we should probably focus on just a few texts in just one or two subject areas. Since Textop's director, Larry Sanger, is a philosopher, and since philosophy concerns the most general of subjects, it will probably be most tractable to do several philosophy texts. Moreover, since the project's aim is to chunk texts in their original language, and we cannot easily test the plans for internationalization using a wiki, the plan would be to collate several works in English. Here is a suggested list from which participants might select a subset:
- Bacon, Essays
- Hobbes, Leviathan
- Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding
- Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government
- Berkeley, Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
- Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
- David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
- Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
- J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism
- J. S. Mill, On Liberty
- J. S. Mill, On the Subjection of Women
- C. S. Peirce, selected essays
- William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
- Herbert Spencer, The Data of Ethics
- G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica
- Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy
- Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
(Items in bold above are ones that people have expressed some particular interest in.)
We might next post messages to a number of philosophy mailing lists, and contact some people individually, and hopefully a quorum of able philosophers will appear as a result of that. Bear in mind that a quorum, for pilot project purposes, might actually be quite small--as few as three or four active people. Of course, more would be preferred.
To avoid (hopefully) the necessity of teaching wiki software, the message will urge people who are familiar with wiki software to get involved.
Another subject for which it might make sense to start up a pilot project would be history, simply because a chronological outline will be so different from an outline of "timeless abstractions" based on philosophical texts. If participants think this is a good idea, we will have to call upon historians to produce a list of a history books to collate: a wide variety of good, public domain, English language histories. If a historian or two would like to provide such a list, we'll include it on this page; Gibbon and Hume might be good to include. (Mail larry.sanger at dufoundation dot org.)
