Get in touch: victor@vjbe.net.

What is Plain Old Text?

Plain Old Text is an open-access archive of historic sources, transcribed as plain text. Most of what is here so far comes from periodicals: newspapers, weekly reviews and medical journals. But the format is the point, not the medium. Any public-domain source that is worth reading and hard to get hold of can have a place here.

Every transcription comes with scans of the original pages and, where possible, a link back to the digital source, so you can always check the text against the page it came from.

Why plain text?

Historic sources are usually locked inside page scans, paywalled databases or OCR output that is too garbled to quote. Plain text fixes that. It is:

• Durable. A text file written today will still open in fifty years, on any device, with no special software.
• Usable. You can search it, quote it, cite it, diff it and feed it into whatever tools you like.
• Readable. It is a pleasure to read on any screen, and easy to reformat.
• Correctable. Every transcription lives in a public repository, so anyone can propose a fix.

Why did you make Plain Old Text?

The project began, under the name Old News, out of frustration while reading a history of 19th-century science that leans heavily on newspaper articles but leaves the reader to hunt down the original pages on platforms like The British Newspaper Archive. Since the texts are in the public domain, it seemed a small effort to transcribe them and host them somewhere easy to read and reference. The archive has grown since then, and so has its scope, hence the new name.

How to Contribute

Corrections and new transcriptions are very welcome. Whether you are fixing a typo or adding an entirely new source, your help keeps the archive accurate and accessible.

Fixing Typos & Mistakes

Each article has a View/Edit Plain Text link. To fix a typo or formatting error, submit a pull request to the article repository on GitHub. For other kinds of mistakes, or if you prefer not to use GitHub, email victor@vjbe.net.

Adding New Sources

To contribute a new transcription, please include:

• The complete transcription.
• The scans or screenshots you worked from, so the text can be verified.
• A link to the original digital source, if there is one.
• The title of the publication or work, the date, and the page number.
• The author, if known.

Transcription Pipeline

You can transcribe however you like. If it helps, the pipeline I use is open source.

Where the Sources Come From

Most transcriptions so far come from:

• The British Newspaper Archive
• The Spectator Archive

Other excellent repositories of digitised material:

• Delpher: Dutch historical newspapers, books and journals.
• Gallica: the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
• Gale: research databases and primary source archives.

Scholarship

Plain Old Text has been used in the following work:

• (May 2026) Victor Elgersma used sources from the archive to write about the status of the nebular hypothesis in the mid-19th century. Read the essay.

If you have used Plain Old Text in your own work, let me know and I will add it here.

GitHub

• Article repository: the plain-text transcriptions
• Transcription pipeline
• This website