Yes, I was aware of "Great British Journeys".
Our site originally went up in 2004, with fewer writers but including Fiennes, Cobbett, Defoe and Gerald of Wales. However we got no publicity from the BBC when they put the series out in 2007.
I missed the original programmes, but did see and was disappointed by the short series on William Camden's Britanica. It pretended that Camden made a single journey, when he actually covered the country systematically. the programme made almost no use of Camden's actual writing.
More and more of these out of copyright authors seem to be available on the web in the form of scanned images of pages with, behind the scenes but downloadable, plain text which is the raw output from Optical Character Recognition software. That was the source for both Head and Byng in the new additions, and I now know where to find similar sources for John Leland and Thomas Pennant from the Great British Journeys series.
However, converting this material to clean HTML is very time consuming. The Johnson addition comes from Project Guttenberg, who make proof-read versions of books available for free download. Guttenberg was also the source for Borrow, Boswell, Gerald of Wales, Hentzner and Moritz, and they were MUCH quicker to add to our collection as almost the only work was the place-name mark-up itself.
I would like to add John Leland as the first of all the systematic itineraries, but really need help converting what is now available on-line into a clean transcription.
Best Wishes
Humphrey Southall
>>> Chris Atkins <[log in to unmask]> 23/12/2009 09:17 >>>
Thanks for this.
You may well know this anyway, Humphrey, but Nicholas Crane did an
excellent series (http://www.bbc.co.uk/greatbritishjourneys/index.shtml)
which included 4 of your author-travellers.
Maybe he might be the person to approach if you want some publicity
about the site!
Happy Xmas to all on the list!
Chris
Librarian: Local Information & Studies
Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead
LIHAS - Heritage Team
Maidenhead Library, St Ives Road, Maidenhead, SL6 1Q
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