J. M. Gesner's Novus Thesaurus Linguae Latinae

On another thread, there has been some discussion regarding monolingual dictionaries. Having come across the CAMENA project, where a good part of Gesner’s 1749 revision of Estienne’s famous Thesaurus has been transcribed, I thought it would be worth a try to see if volunteers would help complete it. So I have collated the CAMENA text with the page images over at Wikisource:
https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Liber:Gesner_novus_thesaurus_vol1_part1of2.pdf

Anyone may contribute as little or as much as desired, but if you wish to consecrate substantial time to this effort, a specific portion could be reserved for you. If this project is publicized enough, we could attract enough contributors to have a fighting chance at succeeding.

Ultimately, if the project is completed, a new edition of the dictionary will be made available on Lulu at cost, probably around $20-40. By comparison, a facsimile of the 1749 edition is currently being sold for 350 Euros by a European publisher.

If you do not wish to contribute personally, the best way you can help is by publicizing it so that others may join in.

Let me play with De litera A, if you please.

I did three pages starting with B, and I must admit that it’s very tedious work. Maybe the project will attract a monk somewhere :slight_smile: if not, oh well.

How did you go so fast? Do you OCR first and then correct?

That would be 10 times slower, trying to correct gibberish. Only slave labour will work with a text like this. We should contract it out to Wal-Mart.