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Fwd: Abbey Library of St. Gall, Switzerland: Online 100 manuscripts (fwd)
by Greg Newby 21 Jun '06

21 Jun '06

This might have some materials suitable for harvesting. -- Greg ----- Forwarded Message ---- From: Christoph FlÃ¼eler <christophe.flueler(a)unifr.ch> To: christophe.flueler(a)unifr.ch Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2006 10:10:11 AM Subject: Abbey Library of St. Gall, Switzerland: Online 100 manuscripts Abbey Library of St. Gall, Switzerland online - free access: www.cesg.unifr.ch - high resolution digital images: over 40'000 facsimile pages - regularly updated: now 100 complete manuscripts - manuscript descriptions and many search options - accessible in German, French, English and Italian Please recommend it to your colleagues and put a link to CESG on your homepage. Â© CESG - Codices Electronici Sangallenses ----- End forwarded message -----

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Re: [gutvol-d] Deleting Clearances
by Frank van Drogen 19 Jun '06

19 Jun '06

>I've got a few that were posted to PG--Widger particularly seems to >directly post when PPVing. Those would be better transfered to status >Submitted, I would think; they need to stick around in some form. You can change them to the submitted state by 'previewing' any dummy file under the clearance. Frank

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Deleting Clearances
by David Starner 19 Jun '06

19 Jun '06

Is there any way we could add a way to delete clearances from the clearance page? I have six clearances on my clearance page I'd like to kill; common reasons were I couldn't get suitable scans from my source or I ceeded it to some other volunteer with their own copy. Besides cluttering up my already cluttered clearance page, it makes some projects look more live than they are.

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http://www.ebooksgratuits.com/
by Norm Wolcott 18 Jun '06

18 Jun '06

The web site http://www.ebooksgratuits.com/ which provided many pd french texts for PG and also had many other formats, has disappeared. Has anyone archived this site? Internet archive gets lost looking for individual books, although the home page is available until December 2005. nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu

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"all of them?"
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Jun '06

17 Jun '06

> http://youtube.com/watch?v=veIU0Jwu54w no comment necessary... -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] the newest d.p. iteration
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Jun '06

16 Jun '06

meredith said: > But reading a book aloud is an extremely slow > and inefficient way to get text into electronic form. that's the point, though. people won't be doing it "to get text into electronic form". that will just be a pleasant side-effect, a tangent from their real aim, which will be "to share a book with the whole world". they'll be doing it because it's _fun_. sure it's work too. but people will do a whole lot of work if they enjoy what they're doing. you see that all the time. > I could *type* a book in faster than I could read it aloud, > much less scan it. but your typed version will be no different than anyone else's. your _recorded_ version, however, will be _uniquely_ yours, perfectly representing the one-of-a-kind snowflake you are, something that your grandchildren, and _their_ grandchildren, can listen to over and over whenever they want to think of you. don't you wish you could hear your grandmother's voice again? > Reading out loud is tiring, even when you're used to it. i agree, it is. but you also get used to it, the more you do it, until you can do it without straining yourself in the slightest. > If you have only read, say, picture books to your children, you may > not realize this. You need to rest your voice after an hour or so. i do performance poetry, so i'm sharply cognizant of voice training. i'm also acutely aware a large audience provides a lot of motivation. > And it takes hours and hours to read an ordinary book out loud, > never mind something like The Lord of the Rings the market for audiobooks has already asserted itself, quite loudly. i imagine that _free_ audiobooks will provide a _very_ large audience. and thus a lot of motivation. > (and, yes, I have read the entire The Lord of the Rings out loud. Twice.). then i guess you must have had sufficient motivation of some kind. > Twice. ya know, if you would have recorded yourself the first time you did it, you wouldn't have had to read it out loud again the second time... ;+) > Scanning is boring, yes, but it is also fast. > And it doesn't make your throat hurt at the end of a session. warm water. (for your throat, not for your scanner...) ;+) -bowerbird p.s. i see your signature-block promotes a book you've written. perhaps you heard that an author who was podcasting his novel recently got picked up by one of the major publishing houses? so lots of aspiring authors might think of becoming podcasters. voice training -- it's not just for performance poets any more! > If you ask me what I came to do in this world, > I, an artist, I will answer you: "I am here to live out loud.” > -- Emile Zola

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Re: [gutvol-d] the newest d.p. iteration
by Joshua Hutchinson 16 Jun '06

16 Jun '06

> If you have only > read, say, picture books to your children, you > may not realize this. That has to be one of the scariest things I've read lately... bowerbird procreating? *shudder* Other than that, I would add one more reason that OCR is more convenient than Voice Recognition ... I can work on a page of typed text at my computer without annoying the crap out of people around me. Can you imagine trying to read a book while sitting at your local Starbucks? Josh

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mark pilgrim
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Jun '06

16 Jun '06

mark pilgrim, an early open-source person, recently switched from apple over to linux... in a blog entry on this, he talks about archiving, and how it gets complicated by file-formats and _especially_ by d.r.m. (which hobbles it by design), and remarks open source does not always equate to open formats (using "gimp" as an example of it). even before he mentioned project gutenberg, i was thinking i'd share a pointer, so here it is: > http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/16/juggling-oranges -bowerbird p.s. i highly recommend -- for guys -- pilgrim's blog entry before this, "howto make the perfect fruit salad and get laid."

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re: [gutvol-d] the newest d.p. iteration
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Jun '06

16 Jun '06

i said: > p.s. plus, as voice recognition improves over the next 5 years or so, > i expect that o.c.r. will take a back seat to voice-transcribed books... then brad said: > ROFL !!! then kevin said: > Ewe no, he mite bee rite. Wee maybe waisting oar thyme. ya know, i never know what i'm gonna say that's gonna set people off. (but i should have learned by now that it'll probably be a throwaway line in the p.s. rather than the meat of the substance in the body of the message.) but hey, i don't mind the challenge. it helps me develop some logic that i might not have bothered with otherwise. obviously kevin here has never used voice-recognition, because no system would give us the line he gives us. that's _not_ to say voice-recognition is problem-free. there are a lot of problems with it. a ton of problems. but there used to be a ton of problems with o.c.r. too. and people still slogged through it anyway, didn't they? the reason people will slog through the problems anyway with voice recognition is because it will be a lot more _fun_ and _easy_ to just _read_ a book through rather than to sit inside an editing system, and that will make the difference. over the past 5 years, some 35,000 people signed up at d.p. roughly 10% -- about 3,500 -- were around when d.p. reset its subscription base a while back. those were the top 10%, so that wasn't a bad thing, but it does go to show that the o.c.r. route is just a little bit too trying for the average bear. even when you distribute out the work. but hey, if that other 90% could do their part to help out by simply recording a book -- they _did_ once express enough interest in the cause to sign up, remember -- then maybe they could have been retained as helpers... and maybe a whole order of magnitude of more helpers could be _recruited_ if the means of helping were so fun. with libre vox, people are already recording old books. audiobooks, always popular, are getting even more so. podcasting is growing the base of recording experience (and audience) in the user-population at a _huge_ rate. and, for those of us keeping track, there has already been a message posted on the distributed proofing forums from a person who reported using voice-recognition software _within_the_current_d.p._system_. now that's dedication. and as the form-factors of our machines continue to shrink, voice-recognition will become more and more important, and more ingrained, and some people will rely on it entirely. and speaking of libre vox, it's important to keep in mind that a _recording_ retains value even _after_ it has been turned into digital text. heck, many people will prefer the .mp3 to the .txt. there's sure a lot more player-hardware out here for the .mp3. moreover, when a person creates a recording, that product is _seeped_ with their contribution. with their own _voice_, for crying out loud. can it get much more personal than that? to some people, that will surely be more satisfying than the simple credit-line at the top of a project gutenberg e-text... and hey, it might mean a lot more to the _end-user_ as well! i can tell you that i've looked at a lot of texts from jon ingram. lots and lots of them. and they almost always look very nice. but none of them has had the impact of the bit he recorded for libre vox, where his accent had me muttering to myself, "hey, i forgot, that bloody bloke is from _england_, isn't he?" there's something very endearing and personal about a voice. even one with a heavy english accent. ;+) so a person who records a book is giving us _two_ products; one is a route to obtaining digital text via voice-recognition, and the other is a recording of that book in a human voice. it might be that down the line, the second dwarfs the first. it's also quite important to remind ourselves that these two products are complementary, not competing with each other. and it's not hard to imagine that the recording will become _especially_ useful when it gets combined with page-scans. a recording of each page playing when the scan is displayed might become the most typical kind of "book" in the future! likewise, it does _not_ have to be either/or between o.c.r. and voice-recognition; we can instead make the two work together. we could do o.c.r. on the scans, and then cross-check the o.c.r. against the voice-recognition results, then concentrate on the differences to intelligently remove errors from _both_ versions. we would expect homonym problems in the voice-recognition, for instance, and scannos in the o.c.r., so could control for that. anytime you combine two different methods for the same result, they can serve as a useful cross-check on each other. bingo. in case you didn't know, some of the people who are obtaining the highest accuracy in their e-texts use text-to-speech to get it. what i'm talking about here can be viewed as the flip-side of that. so, in summary, if you're "rolling on the floor laughing" about voice-recognition and the possibilities it offers to digitizers, you show your lack of vision. there's no other way to say it... of course, your loss is the lurkers' gain, because it gave me a reason to explain. -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] the newest d.p. iteration
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Jun '06

16 Jun '06

marcello said: > Why don't you start your own distributed proofing project because i anticipate that with further research on my part, combined with ever-increasing o.c.r. progress from abbyy, we won't even need much human proofreading in the future. besides, i've already prototyped my "continuous proofreading", and i'll be putting that into place when google hands me their full pre-1923 library of page-scans, which i recently requested. and, to be honest with you, i've become more and more bored with these old books, which -- face it -- we focus on _mostly_ because their copyright has expired. i'd say that 4 out of 5 of the e-texts that are being posted these days are _not_ "classics". (not that nonclassics don't deserve to be preserved as well, but...) further, much of the copyright-constrained stuff of recent decades is merely pap the publishing industry thought might make money. much of it, i couldn't give a shit if it makes it to cyberspace or not... what really excites me now is our new possibility to let _everything_ that _anyone_ might write see the light of day and find its audience. we are finally free of the shackles of the past, meaning that we can free ourselves of the corporate mindset that's blinded us up to now. (and the government one before it, and the religious one before it.) we can now travel far past the edge of the envelope; that's exciting. so rather than converting old books from paper to electronic form, i want to help new born-digital works find their place in cyberspace. i want to encourage writers to see our imaginations can now be free, in a way that has _never_ been true before in all of our long history. in other words, the human race now has a truly unique opportunity! don't get me wrong, i am _really_happy_ old works are being rescued. it's just that, for my own self, the relevance of new works is more juicy. -bowerbird p.s. plus, as voice recognition improves over the next 5 years or so, i expect that o.c.r. will take a back seat to voice-transcribed books...

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