Proofreaders...

OK, OK, so I'm a history nerd. I'm with Isaac Newton on this one: If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

History is not meant to be a dusty Trivial Pursuit game with just a collection of unrelated facts. It is meant to be used, to learn from, to analyze, to understand. History is the story of people - what motivates them, what scares them, what works for them.

If you'll check my links, you'll see a website for the Gutenburg project. Those folks are dedicated to digitally preserving old historical texts. You can read, for free, many texts no longer copyrighted. It's a great way (did I mention for free?) to dabble in the genius of the past.

Click here for The Gutenberg Project.

But if you're a English nerd (maybe I know a few. Well, maybe I am one...), there's an interesting challenge for you. You can get involved in this preservation. There is a group (and I am not making this up) called Distributed Proofreaders who voluntarily read old texts before they are converted into e-texts. They catch the mispellings and the scanner errors.