About the TenantNet edition of How the Other Half Lives
It took a good bit of time, but over a several month period in early 1995, we scanned in and cleaned up Jacob Riis's classic How the Other Half Lives page by page. Considered a landmark on par with The Jungle, Riis's 1890 work accelerated the call for decent housing conditions in New York City. Other pressing TenantNet projects pulled us away from this book (after getting up only the first ten chapters) when we discovered this parallel work by David Phillips of the American Studies Program at Yale University. His treatment of the original work is very thorough and we have no qualms about giving you, the reader, a better product.
About the hypertext edition of How the Other Half Lives
The hypertext edition of Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York reproduces the full text and all the illustrations from the original print edition of this book, first published in 1890 by Charles Scribner's Sons. With the exception of the Appendix, where I have reformatted Riis's original long list of statistical information into a more comprehensible set of statistical tables, I have endeavored throughout the hypertext markup process to preserve the typographic spirit of the original document. Each image has been reproduced full frame, has been inserted into the text at the same point as in the original, and, wherever possible, its alignment to the left, right, or center of the page has also been reproduced.
The citation scheme used in the hypertext edition of How the Other Half Lives, which has been incorporated into the document's internal link coding, is based on a system of numbered chapters and paragraphs, not numbered pages. In the same way that a reference to a particular paragraph in the print edition can be described in a footnote citation, a reference to the same paragraph in the hypertext version can be described as a URL. Thus:
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890), p.23.
is the same as:
"chapter three, paragraph five"
Unrestricted, not-for-profit use of the hypertext edition of How the Other Half Lives is hereby granted. All text and images are in the public domain; the HTML editing is the fruit of my labor. Please send comments, criticisms, and reports of typographical errors to davidp@minerva.cis.yale.edu
David Phillips
New Haven, CT
November 13, 1995
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