Junius R. Lewis (1842–1938) commemorative website with two vintage articles transcribed to digital text.

Note: I often have links set to open in a new tab & try to indicate that using the mouse hover popup.

(Last edited/updated Nov 17, 2024).

I originally discovered a Colorado Magazine article from its Winter 1973 edition titled: "Junius R. Lewis and the Golden Chess Mining Company" by: Thomas L. Green, and wanted to convert it from photocopied image to a digital replication for accessibility purposes. I found out that to meet the compliance standards for eBook support I needed to reformat the citations, etc., and so I ended up retrieving a cited article that was published in the Rocky Mountain News in February of 1936. I transcribed it to digital text too, as well as items from the Boulder Daily Camera that are referenced.

Update: Here is my working epub: Junius-R-Lewis-and-the-Golden-Chest-Mining-Company.epub. ~3.4MB (I will work on formatting the pages better.)

There is a Wikipedia entry for Junius R. Lewis, and the Colorado Magazine article has (and has citations with) his middle initial as "R". The Rocky Mountain News article has his middle initial as "P".

Here is the 1973 Colorado History magazine article about Junius R. Lewis. There was an injustice committed against him that entailed gender issues as well as the racism that he had to contend with. It's a fascinating story! I was also able to retrieve the two Boulder Daily Camera articles that were cited in it from the Carnegie Library for Local History, Boulder, Colorado, and have the images embedded in the pdf. The library curator also sent me another related article and items from their collection that I could include in an epub. The original author of the magazine article actually interviewed a few people and put a lot of work into the piece so I think it's worth the revision update!

Here is the transcribed PDF (opens in new tab or download mobile ~3MB):
February 4, 1936 Rocky Mountain News article about Junius R. Lewis.


Back to Top

Other Details

Here is text from the historycolorado.org article excerpt about Junius R. Lewis that is referenced in the Wikipedia article.

Junius R. Lewis was born in 1842 on a Mississippi plantation. Rather than fleeing to the north as his enslaved mother had advised him, he decided to stay to care for her until she was sold. He left in 1862 and walked hundreds of miles to Kentucky before being arrested by a Confederate officer. He was subsequently enslaved by many Generals in Virginia, including one that was present when General Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant. He ventured back to Mississippi to find his mother, then they headed west through Texas, eventually arriving in Denver in 1882. He worked as a porter for the Pullman Palace Car Company and became friends with Jackson, Westbrook, and Dr. P. E.Spratlin, the first black man to receive a medical doctorate from the University of Colorado. Lewis became a miner, then prosperous president of the Golden Chest Mining, Milling, and Tunnel Company. Ultimately he endured legal battles with the company over wages and property until 1935, three years before his virtually penniless death at Denver General Hospital.

Back to Top

EPUB work progess

Since the Colorado Magazine article contained references that were listed per page it wouldn't export to pdf that would be accessibility compliant. I'm in the process of working on solving the issues. I originally worked at getting a database file set up with the references for a bibliography that'd be embedded in the epub but that was probably more than I needed. There is a way to set up cross-references within the same document so I have that working in the pdf. I need to do more adjusting to the format to get it to export to an accessibility compliant pdf.

The other note that I wanted to include here is that I use Tesseract Open Source OCR software to scan and "convert" the text in a photocopied image of a typewritten page to digital text. I've found that inverting the foreground & background colors on the images will improve the accuracy of the program's output. (It's supposed to automatically detect columns, too.) I will edit this section later and give more details on the process.

Here is my working epub: Junius-R-Lewis-and-the-Golden-Chest-Mining-Company.epub. ~3.4MB (I will work on formatting the pages better.)

Here's a plain text file with a list of the directory & files: epub-file-list.txt

  • I first tried LibreOffice to export to an accessibility compliant pdf but it wasn't working out that well. (I have a note about that below.)
  • I started over and put together a new document, making sure to include alternate text for the images and all, but I'm still getting formatting errors when exporting it to be accessibilty compliant. I included the February 4, 1936 Rocky Mountain News article in the new version, though. My margins aren't working well with the newspaper clipping articles from the Boulder Camera either.
  • There's a program, Sigil-Ebook, that looks promising. I think I'll rebuild the article using it and see if I can get it to export correctly.
  • I used the Sigil epub guide as a template and have a framework started with the articles, including a table of contents page now for an epub. It's still in draft stage at this point. The LibreOffice feature to create an epub rendered code that was more complicated (cluttered) than necessary; that can be an issue with "WYSIWYG" editors for webpages too.
  • What I found out though, is that epubs use XHTML markup coding (which is similar to webpage HTML, and also is commonly used for webpages too). There is a noticeable difference with XHTML being more strict and has integrated error checking. (A page will be viewable in a web browser up to the point where it encounters an error and show the line number of the document where the error is.) EPUBS are compressed archives and the Sigil manual that I'm using as a template consists of the directories: Fonts (device defaults are used if fonts aren't included), Images, Styles (containing the .css stylesheets), Text (the various pages), & the files: content.opf (lists the objects & path/location of archive contents), nav.xhtml and toc.ncx.
  • So I need to work on correctly formatting the markup to get better looking output pages. I think I will also look into retrieving some of the other referenced material, as well.
  • Apparently I wasn't seeing the root directory of the epub when I listed the files & directories (above). In the root directory there needs to be a (just one-liner) "mimetype" file that declares the compressed archive as an ".epub"; also the "META-INF" directory with the "container.xml" file, and the main "OEBPS" directory which contains the directories & files that I listed. I also found out that using numbers in filenames doesn't work (although I don't see anything in the specifications about not using numbers) but the epubs I've looked at don't have numbers in filenames. I also know that my references page and the two pages I have for external news articles are "non-linear", which makes sense.
  • I have a working and standards compliant epub now. I did have an issue with the unique-identifier (e.g., UUID, ISBN, etc.) in that I didn't have one and attempted to fake one. It's mentioned that the identifier (UUID) doesn't need to be from a registration authority and that generating a SHA-1 hash will suffice. I used a text string to get the sha1 hash and then needed to separate (and truncate) the string to a "8 - 4 - 4 - 4 - 12" character format and that worked.

The LibreOffice feature to export to an accessibility compliant pdf wasn't working well with my original document. I found out that .odt files are compressed archives and the "content.xml" is the main file. I was encountering an issue with editing my cross-references list through the GUI. This superuser.com message board post also gives a link to Alternative Find & Replace for Writer (AltSearch) extension that can be used to edit the content.xml file. (The file apparently records modifications to text so mine was a bit cluttered. Less mystery to it at least.)

Some other information about epubs ...

About Website

This website exists to host a current project to covert archived photocopied articles about the ex-slave and Colorado miner, Junius Lewis.

(Note: I re-use my previously made pages as templates and the following I had already included so I kept it in here.)

Oh, "Only the gov't can violate people's rights..." argument? See page 8 of this article on Stanford Law website:


"We want and are entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of American citizens: The right to earn a living at work for which we are fitted by training and ability; equal opportunities in education, health, recreation, and similar public services; the right to vote; equality before the law; some of the same courtesy and good manners that we ourselves bring to all human relations."
~ (Dr.) Martin Luther King, Jr. from August 6, 1946 letter to editor of Atlanta newspaper.



The biggest danger to our rights today is not from government acting against the will of the majority
but from government which has become the mere instrument of this majority...
Wrong will be done as much by an all-powerful people as by an all-powerful prince.
~ James Madison



Class conflict is another concept which upsets the oppressors, since they do not wish to consider themselves an oppressive class. Unable to deny, try as they may, the existence of social classes, they preach the need for understanding and harmony between those who buy and those who are obliged to sell their labor. However, the unconcealable antagonism which exists between the two classes makes this "harmony" impossible. ~ Paulo Freire

Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both. ~ Paulo Freire



"Only a lively appreciation of dissent's vital function at all levels of society can preserve it as a corrective to wishful thinking, self-inflation, and unperceived rigidity"  The Wrong Way Home : Uncovering the patterns of cult behavior in American society | by Arthur J. Deikman, M.D
ISBN 10: 0807029157 ISBN 13: 9780807029152



Force has no place where there is need of skill.
~ Herodotus




Content use in conformance with fair use


Back to Top

Contact

W3C Validated HTML5      W3C Validated CSS