Ref Notes - Monergism

[davejonescue]

On Monergism, they have started a page called Ref Notes. Looks to be the works of the Scholastic's, but with little attempt to beautify them. Just the AI transcription/translation of the txt. with no frills or thrills. Link.

 

[davejonescue]

Just to let yall know:

 

[davejonescue]

As of now I have the following below. My question is, if anybody could lend expertise, which ones are more important to attempt to get out first? One of the parameters, if possible, to keep in, would be that they are not tightly packed double columns (though possible, just time consuming,) or very small writing with light script. An example of this would be the Brown of Wamphray book on the Sabbath. I looked at it, but the way it is printed, it is very compact light script. Accuracy in the transcription is important to me, so I want to do works with the best chance of being accurate. But, there are 1,000's of volumes in PRDL by Reformed folks. So, any recommendations?

• Alvinczi, Péter — Macchiavellizatio, Qua Unitorum Animos Dissociare Nitentibus Respondetur / Machiavellization, Which Responds to Those Who Try to Dissociate the Souls of the United PDF ZIP
• Aretius, Benedictus — Lectiones Septem de Coena Domini ex variis Scripturae locis sumptae / Seven Lessons on the Lord's Supper taken from various places in Scripture PDF ZIP
• Heidegger, Johann H. — In Viam Concordiæ Protestantium Ecclesiasticæ Manuductio / Guide to the Way of Ecclesiastical Concord among Protestants PDF ZIP
• Marckius, Johannes — Compendium theologiae Christianae didactico elencticum / Compendium of Christian theology, didactic and elenctic PDF ZIP
• Marckius, Johannes — Historia Paradisi illustrata / Illustrated History of Paradise PDF ZIP
• Mastricht, Petrus van — Authoritatis Sacrae Scripturae in rebus Philosophicis / The Authority of Holy Scripture in Philosophical Matters PDF ZIP
• Olevian, Caspar — Substantia Foederis Gratviti Inter Deum Et Electos / The Substance of the Free Covenant Between God and the Elect PDF ZIP
• Polanus, Amandus — Syntagma Logicum / Logical System PDF ZIP
• Voetius, Gisbertus — Politicae Ecclesiasticae (Vol. 1) / Ecclesiastical Politics, Volume 1 PDF ZIP
• Voetius, Gisbertus — Politicae Ecclesiasticae (Vol. 2) / Ecclesiastical Politics, Volume 2 PDF ZIP
• Voetius, Gisbertus — Politicae Ecclesiasticae (Vol. 3) / Ecclesiastical Politics, Volume 3 PDF ZIP
• Voetius, Gisbertus — Politicae Ecclesiasticae (Vol. 4) / Ecclesiastical Politics, Volume 4 PDF ZIP

Right now, I am putting in Matthias Martinius De gubernatione mundi commentarius because the name stood out to me on a list of Reformed, and looking at his bio, didnt really se an issue. But, I dont know what works are pressing, important, etc. Any help would be appreciated. These will slowly build over time, and is not my main gig at all; but, if there is a list to work from, where it would certainly benefit people, that would be nice.

##EDIT. I found a few lists to get me started, thank you everybody.

 

[MW]

How do you think it would go with Dutch and the old German font?

De historie van den christelyken Sabbath ... : Koelman, Jacobus : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

4°.

archive.org

 

[davejonescue]

How do you think it would go with Dutch and the old German font?

De historie van den christelyken Sabbath ... : Koelman, Jacobus : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

4°.

archive.org

Last time I checked Blackletter it wasnt the most accurate. And plus, right now there is plenty of Latin stuff to do. Personally, I am interested in Friedrich Lampe's book on Covenant Theology, but it is the same as with the Blackletter (or whatever you call that font) so I cant do it. Also, if it could handle Blackletter well, I would run Musculus through it because that is already in English, along with Bullinger's Common Places. You can always try it out for free. I think Claude should let you upload a page or 2 to Opus 4.6 Chatbot for free, and you can get the results from it as to where it is at on the transcription ability.

Just for the heads up though, and the reason I couldn't get to it right away; is looking at the outputs I have been doing, while it caught some of the margin notes, it was putting others in with the text. That wont work for me. But, was able yesterday, to work with Claude, to create a py app to manually go through and pre-process the facsimiles, removing the margin notes, and headers. Basically "blacking-out" them, but, with the ability to change the black-outs from white, to greyscale, to black, so it matches closely with the imagefiles (which I turn to greyscale to shrink). Yes, its kind of a downer those have to go; but if I have to choose between no margin notes, or margin notes mixing up with the body text; creating errant transcriptions/translations; I am going to choose the former. Getting rid of the headers is going to make it a much more pleasant reading experience. This is actually a mercy from the Lord, because now it will take 2-4 days after work to get a text out, instead of the "press & print" method I though I had, and, this will be much gentler on my pocketbook. While after I found the difference between local API calls, and using Claude Batch, which saves 50% of money, and does it in a fraction of the time (though they have 24hrs-48hrs) the fees can still add up a bit if you (like I thought) have the potential to do 2-3 texts a day. Long story short, for the next few weeks in my off time, I am going to go back and properly prep and reprocess the Ref Notes texts before moving on to something else. I'm just gald I could get that issue resolved. It makes me feel a lot better about the productions.

For me, Ref Notes is going to be L.W. like a hobby. No stress to get anything out as quick as possible; but something to do beside watching TV that, L.W. has benefits for the church at large.

 

[MW]

I think Claude should let you upload a page or 2 to Opus 4.6 Chatbot for free, and you can get the results from it as to where it is at on the transcription ability.

How would I go about breaking apart the pdf on IA into individual pages? I appreciate any step by step advice you can give.

but something to do beside watching TV that, L.W. has benefits for the church at large.

Much, much, much more beneficial. And I think your soul will be thankful to be delivered from what used to be called the idiot box.

 

[MW]

How would I go about breaking apart the pdf on IA into individual pages? I appreciate any step by step advice you can give.

No need to worry. It appears there is a tool online.

 

[davejonescue]

No need to worry. It appears there is a tool online.

Brother, I don't know how busy your schedule is, but if you take the couple hours to watch Youtube, and learn how to run Python on your computer, you are going to be able to do so much more, for a much smaller cost. I could send you a folder of every script I use in the process, but if you dont know how to run py script on your computer, it is useless. Like I have mentioned before, I do not know how to write a lick of code, yet, now that AI will right the code, and all I need to do is run it, I use Python all the time. It saves so much time. You would be amazed of the things you can automate, that if attempted to be done manually would take months or years.

And this is the example I was trying to give. For instance, last week I had a problem, toying around with Heidegger's Corpus. In parts of it, while double column, it sometimes has large chunks of regular text. I don't know a program that will do what I called a "T-Split (top/bottom)" for this particular problem. I cant send this through API, nor can I split it right down the middle. Not only for that, but an app where you would be able to highlight each section so I can number them, so in the output, the files will be pg1a, pg1b, pg1c, etc. All I had to do is ask one of the Chatbots what i wanted to do in Python, with simple speech, and it produced the special app just for that project. Can you imagine trying to do all this by hand with capture and paste? My point, is you do not have to know code now days, you just have to know how to run Python on your computer. If you get an error, you can c/p the error into a Chat, and it will 1. tell you what went wrong, and 2. correct the script so you can try again. You are not too old to learn. You could be up and running, getting to know it in a few hours. Then it would be the process of trail and error. You should give it a try.

 

[MW]

Brother, I don't know how busy your schedule is, but if you take the couple hours to watch Youtube, and learn how to run Python on your computer, you are going to be able to do so much more, for a much smaller cost

I appreciate that. I will look into it if I have to do the kind of mass production you are looking at. Right now I only have the odd project here and there, and I am very selective in what I do. I just tried Koelman and the OCR output was better that IA's text but still below anything googlebooks would produce. I guess I will have to keep hoping the book becomes available at googlebooks at some stage.