Book People Archive

Re: "Scan This Book!"

Bowerbird@[redacted] wrote:

> _except_ for the important notion that books would
> "read each other" and become synergistically linked.
> 
> how -- _exactly_ -- is that supposed to happen?

This is the key question.  My theory is that we already have 
enough books online, that this should start to happen.  If it was 
a good idea, somebody would have copied the e-texts from Project 
Gutenberg and started to cross-link them.

> heck, the official policy at project gutenberg is that people 
> must _not_ "deep-link" into the _content_ of their books per se, 
> but rather only to a catalog page.

That official policy is irrelevant here.  PG doesn't need to do 
the linking.  Let PG do the scanning and proofing.  After that 
some other guy can get the texts from there and do the last part 
of the work.  But has anybody done this?  Or what are they waiting 
for?  It just cannot be that they are waiting for the last book to 
be scanned before they start linking them.

It can be that we are still waiting for a new way of using text, 
just like VisiCalc was a new way to use math in 1979.  When it 
appears, it will seem obvious to everybody, but right now nobody 
can imagine it.  AltaVista and Inktomi seem primitive now that we 
have Google.  What could the next step be?

When I looked around I found a few online copies of Roget's 
Thesaurus where the reference numbers were cross-linked, but 
that's not the kind of innovation that Kelly describes.

Just like job openings on monster.com can be georeferenced and 
plotted on Google Maps, it would be possible to plot David 
Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi on a map.  Has anybody 
done this?  I can imagine that (1) it takes some skill, time, and 
effort to do it (but there are plenty of people who have that), 
and (2) for it to be useful, you need readers who are both 
interested in Livingstone's expedition and your novel user 
interface to the text.  Here's the text, 
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2519

Still, that kind of manual mash-up is not the automatic process 
that Kelly describes.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars@[redacted]
  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/