Update - May 2012
A year after the previous version of this site was launched, we are proud to unveil the latest version of davidhume.org. We have been hard at work over the last twelve months, making the following major improvements:
- We have added the texts of A Letter from a Gentleman and the remaining Essays, thus completing our collection — we now have texts of everything that Hume published apart from the historical writings. This is the first electronic edition of Hume’s collected philosophical works to be made publicly available completely free of charge.
- All of our texts are now fully searchable using the box on the top right of the screen. Using our substantial database of around 5,000 paragraphs of text, you can perform conjunctive and disjunctive searches, search for phrases, restrict your search to particular texts, lookup pages by paragraph number, or paragraphs by page number. Again, this is the first searchable edition of Hume’s philosophical texts to be made available completely free of charge. We very much hope that you find this feature useful — and feel free to tell us if you do, as it was a huge job getting it set up!
- The layout of the texts has been redesigned somewhat. Instead of the sidebar, there is now a red box in the top right of the page. Minimised by default, this box can be expanded by clicking on the title of the collection, or pressing ‘j’ on the keyboard. Inside is a drop-down table of contents for that collection, alongside the familiar ‘Jump to’ box for going straight to a particular page or paragraph, and the drop-down menu for selecting your preferred text (original, edited, or edited with changes highlighted). Additionally, hovering over a footnote anchor in the text will now bring up a text box with the first few lines of the footnote (cut short if it’s a particularly long one).
- The interface for the manuscript of the Dialogues has been substantially redesigned (for the better, we hope). You can now press ‘n’ or ‘p’ on the keyboard to move to the next or previous page, or select a particular page from the drop-down menu in the box on the top right. Pressing ‘t’ on the keyboard, or clicking the ‘T’ symbol in the red box will toggle (show or hide) the text alongside the page image. When the text is shown alongside the image, double-clicking on the image will zoom in, whereupon clicking and dragging with the mouse will allow you to move which part of the page is shown.
- A number of formatting details have been improved; it would be tedious to list them all, but suffice it to say that the look of our editions here is now about as close to the 18th century originals as it is possible to get, without neglecting the advantages of modern editions.
- The site has undergone a complete technical overhaul, and has been almost completely rebuilt from scratch — making the most of what we learnt building the previous version, and also some other new tricks we happened to pick up in the meantime. The result is a quicker, more reliable, and better functioning site.
- And finally: Textual Variants have been taken out of the Texts section, and given a new section all of their own. At the moment this section looks fairly sparse, but the separation is in readiness for the next substantial improvement that we intend to make, complementing our set of Hume’s final editions with details of changes that he made to these texts over time.