Book People Archive

Re: Why proofed and formatted digital text?

On Fri, 17 Feb 2006, Jon Noring wrote:

> Bowerbird wrote:
>
>> in the near future, machines will do almost _all_ the work
>> of morphing "raw o.c.r. text" to a state of near-perfection
>> in regard to both proofing and formatting, so this whole
>> line of questioning will fade to total meaninglessness...
>
> I disagree, and I believe most who work on texts, including those who
> build OCR clean-up tools will disagree with Bowerbird. Of course, it
> depends upon what Bowerbird means by his imprecise marketing term of
> "near-perfection", and by "formatting". His "clean up tools" will
> never reach the level of accuracy and proper text formatting which
> many in DP now produce.

Isn't this a "Straw Man Fallacy"  ???

I don't think anyone is saying that automation should replace humanity
when it comes to proofreading eBooks.

Tools are tools, not human beings, and how many examples are there
where the tools have totally replaced human beings?

Not that many, though I do remember the first time I bought a product
that had obviously never been touched by human hands, and was amazed.

Equally obviously, these tools will continue to improve, and become
more and more useful to those who employ them, and more and more
competitive to those who do not.

It's hardly a question of "either, or". . . .


Thanks!!!

Give the world eBooks in 2006!!!

Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg

[Moderator: The exchange above is starting to look like an argument over
 degrees.  Right now, there are some projects that have online books whose
 text has not been proofread by humans at all before posting.  Will that
 become the norm?  Would it be a good thing if it did?  If the answer to
 either question is "no", how much human involvement would be appropriate
 or necessary for preparing an online edition?  - JMO]