These are sources for the transcript of “Parrots, the Universe and Everything”, one of the last public appearances of Douglas Adams, recorded by the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2001 shortly before his dead. In this lecture he talks about his experiences researching and writing for his book, Last Chance to See, coauthored with Mark Carwardine.
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The full transcript in English, with additional notes and hyperlinks. Rendered directly from the sources in this repository.
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The subtitled video in amara.org. Currently there are subtitles in English, Spanish, French, Greek, and Hebrew. There you can also contribute providing translations into other languages.
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The original video on YouTube, kindly provided by UCSB.
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June 2010. nokyotsu wrote the first draft of the transcript in English. Although mostly complete, this version was far from perfect. Not being a native speaker, there were a few places where he couldn't get the precise words from Douglas, and some misspellings invariably slipped through.
As an experiment in ‘openness’, he made the sources of the transcript publicly editable, so by-passers could contribute by adding the missing pieces and generally improving the transcript. The backend, hosted at the time at navarroj.com/parrots, was just a bunch of messy Perl scripts on top of svn.
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July 2010. Just a month after starting the project, the first edits from anonymous contributors over the internet started coming in.
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May 2011. Nearly a year after the project started, the transcript was all completed by anonymous contributors. Although there were no more missing bits in the text, small fixes and additional improvements kept arriving later throughout the years.
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June 2011. nokyotsu publishes a series of blog posts at Pedazos de Carbono translating the transcript into Spanish: el aye-aye, Komodo, el kakapo, el baiji, and el humano.
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March 2013. maldoreur starts the first Greek translation and syncs subtitles with the UCSB video at amara.org.
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August 2014. The website with the transcript is moved over to nokyotsu.com/parrots. The previous link still works, but now it's just a redirect.
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August 2015. arnauld syncs the transcript to provide English subtitles at amara.org.
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August 2015. nokyotsu moves the sources of the transcript into this public github repository. Further editions to the transcript, or translations into other languages, can be added as pull requests.
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August 2019. nokyotsu makes a few tweaks to the sources, and updates the rendering mechanism (a customised mistune for markdown parsing and jinja templates). The rendered page is now available at nokyotsu.github.io/parrots.