1911 Encyclopedia Britannica Digital Edition

Encyclopaedia Britannica's 11th edition, a landmark reference work published in 1911. The dataset contains the full text of this historical encyclopedia, digitized by Wolfram Research, Inc. It provides a snapshot of early 20th-century knowledge and perspectives.

Use Cases

• Train models for named entity recognition on historical person, place, and concept entries.
• Analyze semantic shifts by comparing term definitions and usage against modern encyclopedia text.
• Study historical bias and perspective by examining article content and framing from the 1911 viewpoint.
• Perform topic modeling on the full article corpus to map the structure of early 20th-century knowledge.

Strengths

• Contains the complete 1911 11th edition, a major historical reference with tens of thousands of entries.
• Provides a structured, authoritative text corpus from a single, well-defined historical period.

Limitations

• Content is over 110 years old and reflects outdated, potentially biased 1911-era perspectives and knowledge.
• The digitized text may contain OCR errors or formatting inconsistencies from the conversion process.

Provenance

Source

Wolfram Research, Inc.

Collection Method

Digitization of the printed 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Time Range

Content reflects knowledge circa 1911.

Geography

Global in scope, but with a Western-centric editorial perspective of the era.