October 2010 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: quarterly report on fadedpage, through september 2010
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Oct '10

18 Oct '10

keith said: > It is good to see Rogers site is making good headway. it _has_ made "good headway" in many important ways, yes. in other important ways, it has failed to attract critical mass. more importantly, one must consider "the recent developments". > It also, seems to be very productive considering its base size. i'm not quite so sure. they've digitized 37 books as of today... that means about one book per week since the start of the year. if they have a half-dozen people doing it, that's not impressive. it's nice, but not impressive. of course, without knowing exactly how much time those volunteers have put in, it's impossible to gauge their productivity. it's comforting to know the _system_ hasn't wasted their time, like over at distributed proofreaders, so i have no reason to question their productivity, given that they haven't attracted critical mass. but 37 books is 37 books... still, in terms of an _experiment_, it's been a _huge_ success... they've tested a number of things, and most of 'em worked well. > As the site is actively producing texts I think > a mention on the PG Homepage would be nice. > > BB it is Rogers site and as you say the proof is the puddin' ;-) yes, but you need to consider "the recent developments"... > I do not it is fair to Roger to say he does not trust his base. > I look at as "quality control". well then, you haven't familiarized yourself with the situation... so you don't know what you're talking about. so why talk at all? > Even one of the biggest collaborative efforts on the web > Wikipedia has "Masters" that make final decisions. > So that idea can not be all that bad. that's not what's happening. know what you're talking about... because i spend a lot of time and energy to make sure that i do. *** the "recent developments" are that roger has decided to pull back. he has posted notice of this, both at fadedpage and over at d.p. i'm not sure _exactly_ what he means, so i can't really picture what the future of fadedpage will be. roger himself might not know yet. but it's clear that the failure to attract a good number of volunteers was disappointing to him. likewise with his failure to have _any_ of his findings about successful innovations picked up by the d.p. site. roger was also bothered by the inability of his basement computer to keep up, even with the tiny demands of his small base of users, and with the administrative time it took him to deal with that side. i really think that p.g. -- either via greg or via biblio -- should offer some hardware resources to roger, and funnel volunteers to him... what he has been doing is something important to the future of p.g. but i honestly don't know if roger's interested in that, at this late date. *** like many people, including some users who used to volunteer a lot of their time on the site, i've given up on distributed proofreaders... but i think this whole scenario bodes _very_ badly for their future. it's understandable when they dismiss a constant critic like myself... perhaps a _ban_ was going overboard, but they were very desperate. yet they have also _consistently_ dissed don kretz. yes, he has been a frequent critic, but he is also a volunteer who gives _lots_ of time. and when he does criticize, he contributes _code_ for improvement, which is continually _ignored_ by those who _could_ implement it... which only goes to show that the assholes there tolerate no dissent. but roger frank? roger is one of their _darlings_. he's one of those dale-carnegie types who only allows himself to say positive things. he was a constant cheerleader for d.p., and is very popular there... indeed, he was voted to the board of directors in their first election. but still, d.p. put the cone of silence on the fadedpage experiment. and, as far as i know, they haven't expressed even a slight interest in picking up _any_ of the successful innovations from fadedpage. it's as if the people running d.p. are _immune_ to improvements... which means they're slowly but surely running d.p. into the ground. it's sad. it's really sad. *** so i strongly suggest that d.p. reach out to roger frank right now. give the man what he needs -- or at least _offer_ to give it to him. might be the only remaining chance that p.g. has for a bright future. -bowerbird

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Re: What texts need for scholarly usage
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Oct '10

18 Oct '10

carlo said: > The most important point however is that > you cannot change how books are quoted > in existing books since hundreds of years. bingo. not to mention that the idea is flawed at the outset. there are just too many complications for it to work. which you quickly discover if you try to make it work. the only people who espouse this idea are those who have never actually made any efforts to make it work. the only way you can make it work is to constrain it, and once you constrain it, you cannot get the buy-in on the wholesale scale that you need to make it work. and even if you could, it would cost literally _millions_ of dollars to go back and do retrofitting, as carlo notes here, so all this ding-ding-dinging in my spam folder is just a bunch of people making a lot of noise about zilch. and i don't even have to read the spam for me to know it. and if you're not in my spam folder, and you say i'm wrong, let's hear your argument. i haven't smashed anything lately; i need the exercise... it won't work. there's nothing you can do to make it work. in the meantime, remember that the measly 30,000 books from project gutenberg pale in comparison when stacked next to the millions and millions and millions of books at google, and google doesn't have any problem at all when it comes to pointing to a particular page, thankyouverymuch... > http://books.google.com/books?id=w1kJAAAAQAAJ& dq=%22or%20not%20to%20be%22%20inauthor%3Ashakespeare&pg=RA3-PA44-IA1&ci=77%2C677%2C585%2C120& source=bookclip -bowerbird

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Re: What texts need for scholarly usage
by James Simmons 18 Oct '10

18 Oct '10

If scholars need e-books with standard page numbers they can always use PDFs and DjVus from the Internet Archive. Anything in PG is likely to be there too. This discussion reminds me of an article in Wired magazine many years ago. Decisions by U.S. courts are in the public domain. There was a publisher that printed these up as reference books. Someone tried to make a database of this information, and included pages numbers from the printed books as part of the data because judges needed that information. The book publisher sued on the grounds that the page numbers were copyrighted, even if none of the actual content of the books could be. This is how I remember it, anyway. James Simmons

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quarterly report on fadedpage, through september 2010
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Oct '10

18 Oct '10

i wrote this a couple weeks back, but i forgot to send it. that's a good thing, too, because there have been recent developments, which i have only now just caught up on... but first, read this... *** i see it's time for another quarterly report on fadedpage. fadedpage.net is roger frank's experimental creation of a collab digitization site, a la distributed proofreaders... it's been up for 9 months now. there's a lot to like about this site -- a lot to like -- so i wish i could report that it's going strong. but it's not. it did grow steadily for the first 6-7 months, but lately, it seems to be shrinking back. it typically has around a half-dozen people active in the last-24-hour-period, and on average about a dozen active in the last week... on the positive side, most of the kinks have now been ironed out, and the workflow seems to be fairly steady. the site has been brave about trying out new stuff, and a number of things have proven themselves as valuable. among these are a "roundless" approach, with a certain flavor of its own, as developed by roger, so that's good. he quickly abandoned -- in practice, if not in his head -- some of the questionable aspects he had had originally, and then settled into a system that was quite acceptable. another innovation was "match the scan" methodology that's a refreshing shift from the tired pseudo-markup kludged together over time at distributed proofreaders. roger has also been good about coding features that are requested by his users. one of those is _global_search_, which is something that i think d.p. _still_ doesn't have, despite many people having suggested it for years now. roger leveraged the roundless mode such that _diffs_ were available quite quickly to users, which makes 'em entirely more useful than they typically are over at d.p. roger also trusted his users, deeply. one example of it is that any user could _immediately_ put a word on the "good word" or "bad word" lists used by the spellchecker. over at d.p., a user can only "suggest" a word, which then must be approved by a higher-up, which is a bit insulting, not to mention inefficient. this implicit trust in the user goes a long way, and it speaks volumes to the community. so, all in all, fadedpage can be judged as a big success... but it's hard for me to get too excited about fadedpage, mostly because it has failed to attract a critical mass yet. it's a big success. but it's not a big community -- at all... i'm not sure if that's because roger doesn't want one yet, or if d.p. has sucked all the energy out of this sphere, but whatever the cause, it's frustrating for the name of change. *** it's also ironic that roger seems to constantly "discover" points that i've been making repeatedly over the years... for instance, here's something current from his forums: > I could have an application run locally > on each proofer's machine, connecting to fadedpage > through XML/RPC for pages. The local application > would be better than anything I could do in a browser. > The user's app would check out a page > and all processing would be locally. When done, > the page would be returned to fadedpage. > This is conceptually exciting and I've done some > preliminary testing of the concept with a DP user. > There are some technical hurdles but it's still > a potential project for down the road. yeah, i've been saying that for years... i've even coded the app. but i'm glad that it's "conceptually exciting"... it's also frustrating that roger seems not to have absorbed some of the lessons that he _had_ learned along the way... here's another something recent in the forums: > scanno: Van Home for Van Horne fairly consistently. > Marked "Home" as a bad word, "Horne" as a good word. those of you who have been here for years will recognize that i would just make that a global change done in preprocessing. this little bad-words/good-words dance, forcing volunteers to find and fix each individual instance of the error, is ridiculous. roger is also wasting a lot of his time trying to create a "master" format that can churn out the various kinds of output he wants. you're reinventing the wheel, roger. i've already done that work. a master format already exists; it's called zen markup language. oh yeah, there's one more thing that bugs me about fadedpage, which is that roger's answer, for may things the volunteers ask, is "don't worry about that, the post-processor will take care of it"... so, on the one hand, he's built a system that empowers volunteers -- by giving them the power to take a page from o.c.r. to "final" -- but then, on the other hand, rips the new empowerment from them by constantly reminding them that _someone_else_ will be making the _real_ decisions _after_ their work is done. it's a sad irony, it is. roger will not achieve the breakthrough that he's looking for _until_ he decides to do the bulk of the "automatic" work in _preprocessing_, and then lets his volunteers seize the power to move the work to final, thereby _eliminating_ the need for any "postprocessing" at all... voila! *** in closing, though, i repeat that fadedpage has been a _success_... however, it has failed to attract critical mass. this is a problem... i don't know what to do about this problem. in the past, i have suggested that project gutenberg funnel volunteers to fadedpage, and i know that michael was willing to do that. but i don't know what roger thought about the idea. and i don't know why it never seemed to materialize. fadedpage has done a good job of testing some new ideas, and these experiments have paid off, but it won't do anybody any good if nobody ever learns from these experiments. let's hope someone catches on quickly... -bowerbird

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Re: What texts need for scholarly usage
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Oct '10

18 Oct '10

there are very good arguments for pagination. but don't expect karen lofstrom to make them. if you want to discuss the issues, we can, but i see no real need to retread this ground now. -bowerbird

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(no subject)
by jbuck814366460＠aol.com 14 Oct '10

14 Oct '10

http://jbuck814366460.lookit-c.com

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