| --- |
| license: odbl |
| language: |
| - fr |
| - la |
| - en |
| tags: |
| - french-revolution |
| - ocr |
| - primary-sources |
| - digital-humanities |
| pretty_name: Scans — primary sources of the French Revolution |
| size_categories: |
| - 10K<n<100K |
| --- |
| |
| # scans |
|
|
| Scans of primary sources from the French Revolution. |
|
|
| The product of this repository is **stable, citable addresses**. Structured facts and |
| translations live elsewhere and cite into this one. Everything here exists to make those |
| addresses resolvable, unambiguous, and correct. |
|
|
| ## Addresses |
|
|
| ``` |
| turgot-1739 a record |
| turgot-1739.p0 its first page — the atlas key sheet |
| journal-de-paris-1789-01-03.p1 page 1 of that day's issue |
| ``` |
|
|
| Ids are flat and never contain `/`, so **directories are cosmetic**: folders can be |
| reorganised without breaking a single citation. Ask the tool what an address points at: |
|
|
| ```sh |
| cd tools && cargo run -- resolve turgot-1739.p0 |
| ``` |
|
|
| ## The model |
|
|
| Four layers, named after their TEI equivalents. `layer` says which; `type` says the genre |
| within it (`newspaper`, `map`, `issue`, `supplement`, `engraving`, …). |
|
|
| | `layer` | what it is | example | |
| | ---------- | ------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------- | |
| | `source` | the publication or work, independent of any copy | `journal-de-paris` | |
| | `copy` | one physical object that was digitised | `journal-de-paris-1789-vol1` | |
| | `document` | the citable intellectual unit | `journal-de-paris-1789-01-03`| |
| | `page` | one scanned side, carrying graphics | `…-01-03.p1` | |
|
|
| Layers may be skipped: `of` points at any ancestor, so a one-off engraving is a single |
| `document` file and does not pay four files of ceremony. A page is never a file of its own — |
| it is declared inline as `[[page]]` in the record that owns it. |
|
|
| A file states only what is new. `[rights]`, `[[resp]]`, `language`, `scan.file` and the rest |
| are inherited down the `of` chain; `date`, `title`, `note`, `url` and `[[page]]` are not. |
|
|
| ## Layout |
|
|
| ``` |
| sources/ |
| frc/ the Newberry French Revolution Collection |
| ab/abondance00unse/ |
| abondance00unse.toml source, one per Internet Archive item |
| abondance00unse.p1.ocr.md OCR, one file per page |
| abondance00unse.pdf the scan |
| …38,377 items across ~700 two-character shards |
| journal-de-paris/ |
| journal-de-paris.toml source |
| 1789/ |
| journal-de-paris-1789-vol1.pdf |
| journal-de-paris-1789-vol1.toml copy |
| journal-de-paris-1789-vol2.pdf |
| journal-de-paris-1789-vol2.toml copy |
| turgot/ |
| turgot-1739.toml source, 21 sheets inline as [[page]] |
| turgot_00.jp2 … turgot_20.jp2 |
| verniquet/ |
| verniquet-1795.toml source, 73 sheets inline |
| verniquet_00.jp2 … verniquet_72.jp2 |
| schemas/source.json GENERATED from tools/src/model.rs |
| schemas/ocr.json GENERATED from tools/src/ocr.rs |
| tools/ the `scans` CLI |
| docs/ the design spec |
| ``` |
|
|
| Binary assets are in Git LFS. |
|
|
| ## The tool |
|
|
| The `scans` CLI is **not in this dataset** — it lives in the source repository at |
| <https://github.com/peasanttide/scans>. What is here is the archive it produces: the records, |
| the OCR, and the page images. Everything below describes what that tool does, for readers who |
| want to regenerate or extend the archive. |
|
|
| `tools/` in the source repository is a Rust crate producing the `scans` binary. One definition in |
| `tools/src/model.rs` drives three things at once: Rust type checking, TOML deserialisation, |
| and — via `schemars` — `schemas/source.json`. The schema is never hand-written, or it would |
| drift from the validator and start lying. |
|
|
| ```sh |
| cd tools |
| cargo run -- validate # the ten semantic checks |
| cargo run -- validate --strict # warnings fail the build too |
| cargo run -- resolve <address> # what does this citation point at? |
| cargo run -- schema --check # has the schema drifted from the types? |
| cargo test |
| ``` |
|
|
| `validate` never opens an image by default — the archive holds several gigabytes of JPEG |
| 2000. The checks that read bytes (real image dimensions, real PDF page counts) are behind an |
| optional feature: |
|
|
| ```sh |
| cargo run --features probe -- validate --probe |
| ``` |
|
|
| ## Pixels |
|
|
| Two commands turn a citation into an image. Both take an address, so nothing ever names a |
| page number inside a PDF by hand. |
|
|
| ```sh |
| cargo run --release --features render -- render journal-de-paris-1789-01-03 |
| cargo run --release --features render -- render journal-de-paris-1789-01-03.p1 --grid 2x2 |
| cargo run --release --features render -- extract journal-de-paris-1789-01-03.p1 |
| ``` |
|
|
| `render` rasterises the page. `extract` writes out the bitmaps stored on it, untouched. |
| Output goes to `.render/` at the repository root, which is gitignored: these are derived |
| files, reproducible at any time, and at native resolution they outweigh the PDFs. |
|
|
| * **Resolution is native by default** — the scan's own, taken from its largest embedded |
| image. Journal de Paris pages come out around 3500x4900. `--dpi` overrides it. |
| * **`--grid RxC` cuts the page into tiles** with `--overlap` percent of slack on the interior |
| edges. A whole page shown to a reader that samples it down to fit is illegible type; for |
| this paper's two-column setting, `--grid 2x2` puts roughly one half-column in each tile. |
| * Both are behind the `render` feature, which is what pulls in the rasteriser. Build |
| `--release`: a debug build is about thirty times slower, and it shows over 888 pages. |
|
|
| `hayro` does the decoding rather than `lopdf`, because every page image in volume 1 is JBIG2 |
| and volume 2 adds JPEG 2000 plates. It is pure Rust, so there is no Ghostscript, pdfium or C |
| toolchain to install. |
|
|
| Each record carries a `#:schema` directive on its first line, which is what gets it validated |
| in an editor. See `schemas/README.md` — the alternative, an editor schema association, was |
| tested and silently does nothing. |
|
|
| ## OCR |
|
|
| Word-level OCR lives in a sidecar beside the record it belongs to, one markdown file per |
| scanned page, reached through the `[[text]]` that points at it. |
|
|
| ```markdown |
| --- |
| of: 1789iemilseptcen00unse |
| page: 6 |
| engine: ABBYY FineReader 11.0 |
| lang: fr |
| w: 2597 |
| h: 4418 |
| dpi: 500 |
| --- |
|
|
| <the page's text> |
| ``` |
| |
| Frontmatter says which page of what, and how big the image is. The body is the page. That is |
| the whole format. |
| |
| **Scalars are bare unless they would lie.** `lang: fr`, not `lang: "fr"` — the frontmatter is |
| meant to read as YAML. But `no` is the ISO 639-1 code for Norwegian and, to every YAML 1.1 |
| parser, the boolean false; a Python user loading that with PyYAML gets `False`. So a value is |
| written bare when it round-trips as itself and quoted when it would not, which keeps the |
| common case clean and the pathological case correct. |
| |
| **What is deliberately not here:** word boxes, per-word confidence, baselines, and DjVu's |
| nesting. An earlier version carried all of it and could write the source XML back out |
| unchanged. The boxes were seven eighths of the bytes — 8.3 GB against about 1.2 GB for the |
| text — and were not being used. Nothing is destroyed by that: the coordinates are still in |
| `XML_for_OCR/` in [frc-data](https://github.com/NewberryDIS/frc-data), one clone away, so a |
| later version that wants them can have them without asking archive.org for anything. |
| |
| ```sh |
| cargo run -- ocr import x_djvu.xml --out ./pages |
| cargo run -- ocr check sources/frc/ab/abondance00unse |
| ``` |
| |
| ## The French Revolution Collection |
| |
| 38,377 Internet Archive items from the Newberry Library, listed by |
| [NewberryDIS/frc-data](https://github.com/NewberryDIS/frc-data). Records and OCR come from a |
| local clone of that repository; only the PDFs are fetched. |
| |
| ```sh |
| git clone --filter=blob:none --no-checkout https://github.com/NewberryDIS/frc-data.git |
| cd frc-data && git sparse-checkout set --cone Metadata XML_for_OCR && git checkout master |
| |
| cargo run --release -- frc ingest --frc-data ../frc-data # records + OCR, ~3 minutes |
| cargo run --release --features fetch -- frc fetch # the PDFs, ~21 hours |
| ``` |
| |
| `frc fetch` makes one request at a time, a second apart, with a `User-Agent` naming this |
| repository, and verifies every download against the size and MD5 archive.org publishes for |
| it. It resumes from what is already on disk, so it can be killed at any moment. |
| |
| ## Licence |
| |
| The **database** — the records, the OCR sidecars, the structure and the addresses — is under |
| the [Open Database License](https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/) (ODbL 1.0). Use it, |
| adapt it, build on it; if you publish a derived database, share it alike and keep the |
| attribution. |
| |
| The **contents are a separate question, and mostly not ours to license.** Every work here is |
| an 18th-century imprint or a 19th-century study of one, long out of copyright everywhere, and |
| the digitisations are published as public domain by the institutions that made them. Each |
| record says so for itself: |
| |
| ```toml |
| [rights] |
| work = "PD-old-100-expired" |
| scan = "PD" |
| attribution = "Digitised by the Internet Archive, sponsored by The Newberry Library." |
| ``` |
| |
| So: quoting a pamphlet, reprinting a page image, or lifting one item's OCR carries no |
| obligation from us — that material is public domain and stays public domain. ODbL bites on |
| the *collection*: the selection, the identifiers, the metadata mapping and the structured OCR |
| taken together. That distinction is the point of using a database licence rather than a |
| content one, and it is why the per-record `[rights]` fields are not redundant with this |
| section. |
| |
| Scans and metadata originate with the [Newberry Library](https://www.newberry.org/) and the |
| [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/), and the item list comes from |
| [NewberryDIS/frc-data](https://github.com/NewberryDIS/frc-data). |
| |
| ## Design |
| |
| `docs/superpowers/specs/2026-08-05-source-archive-schema-design.md` is the authority: the |
| four layers, the inheritance allowlist, EDTF dates, and the ten validation checks, with the |
| reasoning for each. |
| |
