Articles
Stories followed through the books, reading tours, research notes and things to try. Every claim is grounded in primary sources from the collection.
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Stories15 July 202612 min read
Show Me the Number
Whether AI ‘harmony’ with people can be measured or is only a comforting picture: Kepler’s test, synchrony and the Platonic Representation Hypothesis.
From the library3 July 2026
In Memoriam: Joost R. Ritman (1941–2026)
Remembering Joost R. Ritman (1941 to 2026), founder of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, where Source Library began. His motto: ad fontes.
Research notes2 July 202611 min read
The Fish-Voiced Priest
An AI reading the Codex Marcianus turned ‘Ion, the priest of the inner sanctuaries’ into ‘the fish-voiced one’. Why the critical edition carries the text.
Research notes25 June 202613 min read
Can AI Read Classical Chinese?
Against ctext.org our OCR reads printed classical Chinese at about 98.5% character accuracy, and against Legge our translations hold up.
Stories21 June 20268 min read
The Naked Philosophers
The naked sages Alexander’s fleet-captain met in 327 BCE, later made ancestors of a Rosicrucian Brotherhood, followed through eight books.
Research notes21 June 20266 min read
The Giants Were Never Fully Translated
Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi Historia, our most-read book, has never been fully translated into English, nor have Kircher’s major works.
From the library19 June 2026
Our Vision: A Letter from the Founder
Derek Lomas, who founded Source Library, on why it exists, what it takes to translate the world’s untranslated books, and the five-year budget.
Research notes19 June 202611 min read
How Many First Translations, Really?
An AI agent fact-checked a sample of our ~5,700 first-translation badges. The bigger error was the firsts we missed, and fame predicts a false claim.
Stories19 June 20269 min read
Theire Soe Admirable Herbe: How the West Forgot, and Remembered, Cannabis
From Robert Hooke’s 1689 report on ‘bangue’ back to the Shennong Bencao Jing and on to Baudelaire: cannabis in sixty books and twelve languages.
Research notes17 June 20267 min read
Quality Control on Four Million Machine-Translated Pages
A 1589 page translated as one word led us to 25,000 more. Finding ‘translation collapse’ in four million AI-translated pages, and our own errors.
From the library2 June 202620 min read
How IIIF Helped Us Translate the Renaissance
How the IIIF standard let us import books from thirteen archives and serve our OCR and translations back. Notes for a talk at IIIF 2026 in Leiden.
Research notes1 June 20266 min read
How Big Is the Library?
We counted every word: OCR, translations and enrichment. Five to seven billion, about the size of English Wikipedia, and a bug that nearly tripled it.
Research notes31 May 20268 min read
How Long Would It Take to Translate the Renaissance?
We measured how fast new Latin translations appear and counted what is left. At this pace the Latin Renaissance alone would take ten thousand years.
Stories30 May 202615 min read
Man, His Own Maker
Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI read beside Pico della Mirandola, whose theses Innocent VIII banned in 1487, the first printed book the Church banned.
Research notes30 May 20263 min read
Does the AI Get Religion?
One leaf of a Javanese Old Testament that the AI translated into 491,418 characters of ‘generations of generations’. It happens only with scripture.
Stories30 May 202611 min read
Did an AI Write the Pope's AI Encyclical?
Magnifica Humanitas was flagged 46% AI-written, with 127 em dashes as the clue. Tested against eight human encyclicals, the clue is a baseline artefact.
From the library26 May 202610 min read
The Carbon Ledger of a Digital Library
We logged every API call behind the OCR and translation of 4.1 million pages: about 1.8 tonnes CO₂e, roughly seven return flights to London.
Research notes18 May 20268 min read
Did the AI Read This?
A Bayesian survey of 16,871 OCR’d volumes: about 43% looked confidently new to AI training, 21% confidently in it. Revised in an October re-run.
Reading tours17 May 202616 min read
The Real Hogwarts Library
Nicolas Flamel, Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus were real. The alchemy, bestiaries, grimoires and Kabbalah behind Hogwarts, in modern English.
Research notes17 May 20269 min read
What Makes a Good Scan?
Pixel statistics, AI judgement and a model that rated a blank page 95/100: designing a quality score for each of 100,000 illustrations in rare books.
From the library15 May 202613 min read
The Deletion
How a Claude Code session in one of ten open terminals hard-deleted 4,758 books on 13 April 2026, with the actual prompts and the postmortem.
Research notes10 May 2026
By the Numbers
A visual tour of the library’s size: books, pages, languages and centuries, how far the pages are through the pipeline, and the storage behind it.
Research notes23 April 202610 min read
The Confident Hallucinator
AI OCR tested across five scripts and three Gemini tiers. A model can be 100% consistent and 0% accurate, and thinking mode fixes what model size cannot.
Research notes23 April 202612 min read
Benchmarking AI OCR on 232,000 Pages of Bhutanese Manuscripts
Three AI models tested on handwritten Tibetan from 1,358 Bhutanese manuscripts, 232,000 pages from Gangtey, Drametse and Tshamdrak.
Interactive22 April 20268 min read
Mapping the Incunabula
An interactive graph linking nearly 1,000 books printed before 1501 by author, printer, place and subject: the networks of early print.
From the library20 April 20268 min read
Facing Page vs Interlinear
Our facing-page reader against interlinear display, original and translation woven line by line, for Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian texts.
Stories19 April 202610 min read
What Ficino Heard
The Poimandres in three translations side by side: Ficino’s Latin of 1481, a 17th-century English version and an AI translation made in 2026.
Interactive17 April 20264 min read
Reading Through the Translation
Click any English word in a translation to see the Latin or Greek it came from, shown on Ficino’s De Voluptate. Alignment by Gemini embeddings.
Stories16 April 202612 min read
Cellulae
A word on page 32 of a Secretum Secretorum manuscript launched biology; the argument on page 33 helped criminalise rape victims for 800 years.
Stories15 April 202612 min read
The Singularity Was Published in 1486
Pico della Mirandola’s 1486 Oration and other old texts on unfixed human nature, panpsychism and the planetary mind, in the Latin and German.
How this article was made
This is an AI-assisted article. Derek Lomas set the question; AI models searched the library, read the sources and drafted the text, which was reviewed before it was published.
Every quotation is checked by machine against the scanned page it comes from and links to that page, so you can read the original yourself. The article is a living document: it is revised when a reader finds an error or the library gains a better source.
How these articles are made · Revision history · Spot an error? Suggest an edit