Do you use any off-browser tools to navigate archive.org / google books? if so which? or the web sites always sufficed?

>There's also a couple torrents of 17th-19th c. journal articles.

Could you expand a bit on this? This sounds very interesting for a project of mine! Where did you find torrents of 17th-19th c. journal articles? It sounds like the copyrights on these would have expired, did you find human curated database of this era journal articles? how comprehensive is it, all journals of this time span?

(one of the things I would like to do is map out the transition from alchemy to chemistry, for example WP states Lavoisier convinced the scientific community that sulphur was an element and not a compound, which sounds utterly bizarre for essentially all of us who were exposed to chemistry as a deductive system without the abductive reasoning that led to it)

>I've made my own sqlite databases from the meta information and ran ocr over them to make things searchable.

That is pretty amazing work!

> I'll be putting more of these tools in the repo and eventually put the search systems online for the general public. Google's navigation of annualised volumes is a joke so I'm going to do better.

Where is this repo you mention?

I mentioned that I listen to a lot of podcasts; have been, in fact since ~2006. I've watched the evolution of the medium over the years, have seen many pods come and go, and have witnessed many content creators experiment with different methods of attaining/maintaining/interacting with listeners.

Later on, as the form started to mature and gain more of an audience, the issue of monetization became more and more important and necessary; I've seen many experiments focused on that facet as well. This was still before "podcast" had entered the vernacular for most people I would classify as tech-adjacent--the general public was still not really aware of podcasting. Those who were didn't exactly advertise their listening habits yet, and podcasts were almost like an embarrassing thing one did in private.

You've done so much correctly, at least from my observations over the years, from the get-go.

If some of your ideas come to fruition, it would be a boon to those who'd like to make a podcast of their own, especially if technical or academic in nature. I love the work you've done, appreciate the open distribution of your expanding toolkit, and also want that auto-hyperlinked footnotes a whole lot.

I am doing what I can to encourage you for two reasons. One, I am personally interested in the subject(s) being covered, and I think projects like this are needed if we aren't going to lose a lot to the mists of history in the face of accelerating acceleration, to borrow a phrase. Two, I want the tools for my project and do not possess the requisite skills to make them myself, although I'm working on it.

So, selfish but genuine encouragement...