I got a tip about Distributed Proofreaders and went over to take a look.
Sometimes the thing about being an ex-medievalist is that you don’t have other medievalists around to share the joke with.
See, what DP has done is reinvent the pecia system of manuscript-copying. Particularly at medieval universities where students had to copy their own textbooks, the one-copyist-one-book system simply became too slow. So popular books got broken up into chunks called peciae, and the chunks were passed around among student copyists.
DP discovered that the same system gets books proofed faster. (For complex books, I would wonder about accuracy—but for the kind of thing they’re doing, they’re probably all right.)
Those medievals. Knew more than they let on. Some of their wheels we’re still reinventing.
