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Neil J Mann Member
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Does anyone know if any libraries, collections or sites offer searchable versions of the works of Jakob Boehme, preferably fairly complete? |
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Alan Pritchard Guest
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You did not say whether you wanted German or English, but a good place to start would be Jacob Boehme Resources at http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~janzb/boehme/ Also http://www.passtheword.org/DIALOGS-FROM-THE-PAST/ http://www.matthew548.com/Boemain.html You could also have a look at my bibliography: http://www.alchemy-bibliography.co.uk/online.shtml at call number 7:248.22 [BOE] HTH ALAN |
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Paul Ferguson Member 
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If you want the original texts, try here: http://sunny.biblio.etc.tu-bs.de:8080/DB=2/LNG=DU/CMD?ACT=SRCHA&IKT=1016&SRT=YOP&TRM=per%20boehme,%20jacob+and+mat+o |
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Neil J Mann Member
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Thank you very much for the links. I hadn't seen the Passtheword site before and had forgotten how excellent Alan's bibliography was. I am searching for the source of a quotation in English, but have just about enough German to try for possible German originals in German text. I've tried each of the available searchable English texts, so far with no success. Unfortunately the Google scan-transcriptions of the Sämmtliche Werke (linked on the Pegasus site) seem completely stumped by black letter, so are unsearchable, until they get to the third volume where they are relatively accurate, but with enough slips to make searching fairly unreliable. I hope that they can resolve the first two volumes, since the third volume shows that they do have the capability of rendering (fairly) good electronic transcriptions, and then tweak that further. But that will be for the future. Are the Herzog August texts searchable? -- I don't always find it a very clear website to use and I have only managed to find the images -- if anyone has managed to ensure correct scanning of black letter, it should be them. There are also some English versions of some Boehme texts available for purchase and download ( http://store.payloadz.com/ ), and I may need to try those for some texts that don't seem to be available elsewhere (Mysterium Magnum, for example). Ideally, however, it would be good if there was some place with a global search possibility for the collected works, such as Adam was suggesting recently for the website's alchemy texts. The text I am looking for may not be the same translation, so it would be more feasible to run varying searches over the whole works than to try them one by one. I might try to assemble my own mega-document later on if I'm still coming up against a brick wall. Thank you, however, for the advice and resources which are very good leads and I'll keep on at it. |
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Paul Ferguson Member
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Another useful link here: http://ignisetazoth.blogspot.com/2007/10/writings-of-jakob-bhme.html |
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Paul Ferguson Member
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Neil J Mann wrote:Are the Herzog August texts searchable? -- I don't always find it a very clear website to use and I have only managed to find the images -- if anyone has managed to ensure correct scanning of black letter, it should be them. There is some interesting software mentioned here if someone wants to do a project: http://www.frakturschrift.com/ "ABBYY FineReader XIX is a special version of the award-winning FineReader optical character recognition (OCR) software for recognising "fraktur" or "black letter" texts from the period between 1800 and 1938. It is designed to convert scans of old documents, books, and papers into text for the purpose of digital archiving and publishing, and it is the first omnifont OCR software for Fraktur." |
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adammclean Member 
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FineReader seem to restrict the number of pages you can read in the different versions, and charge about 10 pence ($0.20) per page for the 2500 page version. At nearly 300 pounds ($600) it is too expensive for me ! |
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Paul Ferguson Member
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adammclean wrote:FineReader seem to restrict the number of pages you can read in the different versions, and charge about 10 pence ($0.20) per page for the 2500 page version. I believe the Open Source Tesseract software can also cope with Fraktur: http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ |
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Neil J Mann Member
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Thank you for those links, Paul. The links provided by the Ignis et Azoth blog to Scripd provide scans of the complete Law translation, which is downloadable, though without transcription. High quality scans are offered by The Jacob Boehme Foundation, http://www.jacob-boehme.com/ , on CD, but the Law works come in at $300, and the CDs don't seem to include a text version for searching. Individual works in earlier translations are cheaper, but add up! The versions offered on Payloadz (ominous name for customers) do include a text version, but are not the complete works. Obviously the technology for black letter is out there, so hopefully Google will start to use it. I've sent alerts that they're gobbledegook, but I don't know whether those have any effect or whether they care too much about German texts. |
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Paul Ferguson Member
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Neil J Mann wrote:Thank you for those links, Paul. The links provided by the Ignis et Azoth blog to Scripd provide scans of the complete Law translation, which is downloadable, though without transcription. Don't you have the option of downloading it as Plain Text? |
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Neil J Mann Member
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It offers the option of plain text, but nothing downloads, so I don't think there is actually any plain text to download. I'll try it again later, in case it was a bad connection -- the Pdfs of the scans also came out rather strangely, with each page repeated three times across each single page. |
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Paul Ferguson Member
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Some searchable Boehme texts in English are to be found here: http://kingsgarden.org/English/Welcome.htm Click on Digital Library. |
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Neil J Mann Member
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The King's Garden Center is a resource that is completely new to me -- many thanks, Paul, for pointing it out, since there seem to be some interesting texts gathered here. The Boehme texts seem to be largely the same as Pass the Word's (titles, formating etc) , but I'll do some further searching tonight. |
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Alan Pritchard Guest
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Yes, I assumed that. Alan |
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Paul Ferguson Member
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Neil J Mann wrote:The King's Garden Center is a resource that is completely new to me -- many thanks, Paul, for pointing it out, since there seem to be some interesting texts gathered here. The Boehme texts seem to be largely the same as Pass the Word's (titles, formating etc) , but I'll do some further searching tonight. King's Garden seem to be Martinists. Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin was, I believe, the first person to translate Boehme into French. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Claude_de_Saint-Martin |
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Paul Ferguson Member
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Neil J Mann wrote:The King's Garden Center is a resource that is completely new to me -- many thanks, Paul, for pointing it out, since there seem to be some interesting texts gathered here. The Boehme texts seem to be largely the same as Pass the Word's (titles, formating etc) , but I'll do some further searching tonight. I forgot to mention the splendid: http://www.sacred-texts.com/ |
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Paul Ferguson Member
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Paul Ferguson wrote:adammclean wrote: I have recently been using Tesseract in connection with a project and I thought I would report back here as I am very pleased with the results. 1. If you are using Windows then the best approach seems to be to download the FreeOCR program from here (using the blue button): http://www.paperfile.net/download.html 2. Now you will need to download the Fraktur file deu-frak.traineddata.gz from here: https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/downloads/list 3. You will need 7-Zip or a similar program to decompress the .gz file. Decompress the file to the tessdata subdirectory of FreeOCR. 4. Now rename the deu-frak.traineddata file, otherwise it won't show up in the FreeOCR language list, since deu is already used for standard German. I renamed the file to ger.traineddata – the language will then show as ger. Away you go... You can process both scanned files and .pdfs which you have downloaded from the Internet, although I didn't get particularly good results with Google Books. Not perfect but a huge timesaver! N.B. I found it ran OK under Windows 7 but I had problems with the dreadful Windows 8. There are also versions available for Linux, Mac etc. Hope this is some use anyway, Paul Last edited on Fri Jul 26th, 2013 12:21 pm by Paul Ferguson |
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Paul Ferguson Member
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The free pdf-reader Foxit Reader: https://www.foxitsoftware.com/products/pdf-reader/ does a pretty good job of OCR'ing Fraktur and Schwabacher files. Just save the download in Foxit as a .TXT file. This should OCR it reasonably well into Antiqua, though it doesn't seem to work with certain files. If it doesn't work with your file, search around for an alternative source file using Wikisource: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page If you use the free WP software Libre Office: https://www.libreoffice.org/ with the Alt Search extension: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/alternative-dialog-find-replace-for-writer you can strip out most of the white space in your OCR'ed file by searching for /p (End of paragraph) and replacing it with nothing. You'll still need to do a bit of work on it depending on the quality of the original scan but it is obviously much faster than transcribing manually. And all completely free! Last edited on Mon Jul 11th, 2016 10:29 am by Paul Ferguson |
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Paul Ferguson Member
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Fraktur file for FreeOCR now available here: https://osdn.net/projects/sfnet_tesseract-ocr-alt/downloads/deu-frak.traineddata.gz/ Seems to work OK with Windows 10. |
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