Comment by idiotclock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by idiotclock | Hacker News Reader

One of the problems searching in these books is that there is no standardized spelling in early modern literature.

There is a project called DREaM, at McGill to standardize for "distance reading" (macro analysis).[1] It uses a program called VARD (a text preprocessor trained to correct spelling).[2]

Strangely, this application is licensed with the creative commons. I think this means that it is closed source. Does anyone know of any open source alternatives?

It cannot handle such an immense amount of data,[3]

[1] http://earlymodernconversions.com/introducing-dream/

[2] http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/vard/about/

[3] http://www.matthewmilner.name/2014/11/18/VARD-and-EEBO-TCP/

There are lots of different CC licenses. None of them are closed-source, although there are some which don't allow modification (No-Derivs / ND). Others disallow copying for commercial use (NonCommercial / NC), and a couple allow almost anything (Attribution / BY, No Rights Reserved / CC0). https://creativecommons.org/choose/

> There are lots of different CC licenses. None of them are closed-source, although there are a few which don't allow modification.

Licenses that don't allow modifications are closed-source. At least, they are inconsistent with the Open Source Definition (specifically, with criteria #3: "The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.")

http://opensource.org/osd-annotated

Oh right, I was just thinking of open publication.

I think that the distribution of VARD is allowed (if non-commerical), but editing the source code isn't. I think this because I cannot find the source for VARD.

That's why I think it's strange it is licensed CC.

They're using BY-NC-SA https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/ so it is strange that they limit access. I wonder if there are two competing groups, or if the legal department got paranoid.

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