Some house owners probably were ashamed and possibly feared fellow citizens, eventually becoming aware of how badly front gardens and faces were kept when zooming their objects more closely on the web.
But here I have come not to bury Google but to praise them. I was preparing a talk about the Revolution in Baden in 1848/49 to be given here in Freiburg, and I was browsing the web for original information on Friedrich Hecker and Gustav Struve. Both are among those who had actively fought in Baden for the German Republic as early as the middle of the 19th century. And there I suddenly found two books written by these very persons while they were in Switzerland, the country just across the border where they had initially fled to before emigrating to the States. The two books published in Switzerland are:
Dr. Fr. Hecker: Die Erhebung des Volkes in Baden für die deutsche Republik im Frühjahr 1848, Druck von J. C. Schadelitz, Basel 1849 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München) and
Gustav Struve: Geschichte der drei Volkserhebungen in Baden, Verlag von Jenni, Sohn, Bern 1849 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München).
These publications are available on Google books in facsimile as PDF files and as text in the epub format. The originals scanned were taken from the Bavarian State Library in Munich. I enjoy reading their Gothic print on my iPad and admire all the graffiti readers have left over the years on those pages as an extra bonus. In the app GoodReader, I can mark paragraphs for future reference, but I take refuge in the processed text for copy and paste. It is not easy to recognize Gothic printed characters correctly, but the people at Google did a marvelous job, although you get the rough text without any corrections.
But here I have come not to bury Google but to praise them. I was preparing a talk about the Revolution in Baden in 1848/49 to be given here in Freiburg, and I was browsing the web for original information on Friedrich Hecker and Gustav Struve. Both are among those who had actively fought in Baden for the German Republic as early as the middle of the 19th century. And there I suddenly found two books written by these very persons while they were in Switzerland, the country just across the border where they had initially fled to before emigrating to the States. The two books published in Switzerland are:
Dr. Fr. Hecker: Die Erhebung des Volkes in Baden für die deutsche Republik im Frühjahr 1848, Druck von J. C. Schadelitz, Basel 1849 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München) and
Gustav Struve: Geschichte der drei Volkserhebungen in Baden, Verlag von Jenni, Sohn, Bern 1849 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München).
Wikipedia has a similar project making old texts publicly available on the web called Wikisource. All texts must have been proofread three times before they are accepted.
The web is full of treasures. Let us find and use them.
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