Web Research Project Idea on Swami Vivekananda

I have a cool web project idea. It may not bring you money but it will be very satisfying to you if you are a fan of Swami Vivekananda. I want to collect all the newpaper mentions of Swami Vivekananda from 1902 and earlier, scan the relevant section(s) and manually (or with high quality ocr but verified for accuracy) provide text of the news. This will be a tremendous resource for anyone interested in the life and works of Swamiji. The best part is that you can do all of it without leaving your computer and without any extra hardware. I will show you how.

Recently Google opened up 200 years of newspaper archives, starting from mid-1700’s. You can search newspaper stories on Swamiji from 1929 and earlier here. News later than that shouldn’t be very relevant for this project. It shows 21 items of which only one is from tnr. The rest are all from newspaperarchive.com.

newspaperarchive.com has 199 newspaper mentions of Swami Vivekananda. The total news on 1902 or earlier should be much less. They provide full access to the original newspaper scans for a monthly fee of 9.95. I think one month’s access should be enough for this project.

Unfortunately the sample ocr they provide for free is of extremely low quality, probably intentional and also because ocr cannot understand and interpret well the newspaper’s multi-column format. The transcribing has to be done manually to be useful at all. Here is an example:

NOTED HINDOO MONK DEAD. Swami VIVEKANANDA, Who Preached Himself Into Fame. NEW YORK, July ad- vices from Calcutta announce the death in n monastery near there of Swami VIVEKANANDA, the Hindoo monk and philosopher who preached him- self into New York’s exclusive so- ciety. Vivekauanda’s original mission here was as a delegate to the par- liament of religions at the world’s fair. He remained long after the fair was over in response to invitations by prominent members of the “higher thought” movement in this who were greatly impressed by his teachings. Then society took him up as a “fad” and lionized him.

The project will consist of downloading all the relevant available newspaper scans on or before 1902 and then manually copying the relevant sections. They should then be hosted (I would be glad to provide free hosting & support) along with the original scans using any easy to use CMS like Mambo. It would be wonderful if they can then be correlated with original letters from Swamiji describing the events mentioned. You can find them in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. For example I remember reading the story of east Indian dancer from Savannah somewhere, recounted in one poorly ocr’ed article.

I would be willing to provide as much support as required other than doing the work myself. Let me know if you are interested or have some ideas to improve this.

The same idea can be used for any important personality like Abraham Lincoln to get a biography simply from newpapers articles about him. It can then be correlated with available biography material. It will also show the perception of the people when he lived and how it differs from our perception about him today.

Personally I am interested in Swamiji’s life more than anyone else in the newspaper era.