Book People Archive

A short Shakespeare digest

Ny work today got busy enough that I have very little time to 
send through BP posts,   Since there's been a flurry of posts on
bookscanning and Shakespeare, and it seems to be going in a less than
efficient direction, I'll digest them all here, and then try to
point the thread in a useful direction.  (It's quicker for my mailer
to send through one 1 post than 4.)  There are also some other submissions
in the queue on other threads, which I hope to send through later
tonight if time permits.  Thanks to all for your patience.

We've already seen Bowerbird write:

BB> i think everyone here is well aware of
BB> the limitations of page-scans, michael.
BB>
BB> the inability to search -- and the need to
BB> retype quotes -- also applies to p-books,
BB> and people have lived with that for centuries. [...]
BB> and during time, p-books have proven to be
BB> tremendously useful over the last 500 years,
BB> likewise, the scan-set of a book can also be read,
BB> so i think it will prove to be just as useful, thanks...


And Michael reply:

MH> Do you really "think it will prove to be just as useful?"

MH> How about when you want to write a paper on how Shakespeare
MH> deals with marriage?

MH> How are YOU going to find and list all the references to:

MH> marriage
MH> marry
MH> troth
MH> betroth
MH> betrothal
MH> wed
MH> wedding
MH> etc., etc., etc.

MH> I have it on good authority from Shakespeare experts
MH> that such a paper could not be written your way.

Bob Kobres replied:

BK> That might not of been the best example to use, Michael.  It looks like
BK> it would be a fairly easy task here: 
BK> http://www.leoyan.com/djvu-editions.com/SHAKESPEARE/COMPLETE/ 
BK> even without a DjVu viewer: 
BK> http://www.leoyan.com/djvu-editions.com/SHAKESPEARE/COMPLETE/search.html 

The followups that haven't yet appeared on the list are as follows:

Michael Hart asked Bob in reply to his message:

MH> Is Bob Kobres suggesting that Deja Vu works with paper pages?

(I don't think so, but one can scan paper pages and create a DjVu file
 that has combines a page image with searchable text of that page image.)

In reply to Michael's assertion above that "such a paper could not be
written your way", Bill Janssen snarked:

BJ> Wow, I hadn't known that Shakespearean scholarship didn't exist before
BJ> 1950, when all people *had* were hardcopies of page scans!  Yet another
BJ> new business Intel has enabled!

Which prompted Michael to post:

MH> I forwarded this to Mr. Ockerbloom for a spam folder update.

I don't have a "spam folder" per se, but this looked to me more like
a light hyperbole-responding-to-hyperbole quip than a personal attack.
From what I recall, scholars *were* doing detailed word and concept analyses
of Shakespeare before computers, but it was a rather long and painstaking
process, aided somewhat by painstakingly compiled concordances.
Having machine-readable text to automate the searches makes this sort
of analysis a lot easier.

I think we have general consensus on these points:

  -- Having digitized books is better than not having digitized books

  -- Page images are useful in many ways, and allow some uses
      some readers value that aren't supported as well if one just has
      text transcriptions.

  -- Machine-readable transcriptions are useful in many ways, and 
      allow some uses some readers value that aren't supported as well
      if one just has page images.

  -- If you have good page images and good recognition software, you
      can create useful machine-readable transcriptions from page images.

  -- Different people have different opinions on the relative importance
      of page images and machine-readable transcriptions in relation to
      what they're interested in doing with online books.

  -- There are lots of projects out there, some with more emphasis on
      page images, some with more emphasis on transcriptions, some
      focusing on integrations of the two (e.g. DjVU).

  -- Which provides both lots of opportunities for people to focus
      on what they value most, and also lots of opportunities for people
      to argue how their way is better than other ways. :-)

Anything else to add not already covered by the above?  If so, feel
free to follow up.

John