Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts

sweisman

I built Ars Astronomica to make historically important works on astronomy, calendrics, and related sciences accessible in modern English. The project combines OCR, AI-assisted translation, editorial review, and publication into a workflow that can handle book-length works while preserving diagrams, mathematical notation, and references. The site currently includes English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin works, including texts that have never previously appeared in English and others that survive only in manuscript form. All editions are released under a Creative Commons license. I'm interested in feedback from historians of science, classicists, medievalists, digital-humanities researchers, and anyone interested in AI-assisted scholarly publishing.

madhu_ghalame

This is a valuable initiative. It would be great to include more historical context alongside each translated work.

domschl

Why was the comment of the author of the translation-site that explains the methodology flagged / dead? The mere fact that the translation was AI-assisted shouldn't be a reason to flag a comment. AI translations, especially supervised translations, can actually achieve a reasonable level of quality. Disagreement on AI philosophy shouldn't be a reason to flag a contribution.

bflesch

Nice project, but I think the PDF format could be improved. I'd prefer having landscape layout and original text and translated text side-by-side or keep the portrait layout and do a line-by-line translation so that it is easier to review and spot translation errors.

lordgrenville

While it's really cool that this is possible now, this project seems to be a thin wrapper around running Claude. Presumably, someone who wanted to read one of these books could just run it through Claude themselves with comparable results. Sharing some artifact of your own added value, or things you learned in the process, would be more interesting to me than the output.

dwohnitmok

"All translations in this collection are © Scott Weisman. All rights reserved, except as granted by the license below." Does copyright actually belong to Scott Weisman if all the words are outputs of LLMs? Is there any relevant case law here? I'm very curious about whether LLM outputs are copyrightable by the LLM user (I'm guessing potentially it varies throughout the world).

tulio_ribeiro

Hey, man. Great work and thanks for sharing this as CC.

deluvenec

As a jew: it would be better to put up a site which does not risk to create the false impression of somehow comparable contribution of early european astronomers and medieval (and not so medieval) rabbis.

mondainx

Don't get me wrong, this is awesome, but it could be better by adding Greek and Arabic, and possibly Sumerian documents?