al said:
from what I've read here the past few weeks, I think you've taken on a project that's more than your current skills/experience will let you handle easily.
well, al, i underestimated james based on that, too. so i can't say i blame you. but i found i was wrong. his book showed that he possesses lots of expertise. james has done a ton of work to learn his way around. he is kind of "google-smart", rather than experienced, but google-smart's a good way to get yourself started. i mentioned his strengths in a recent post, and forgot to include that he obviously has a love for digitizing, and -- deeper still -- both love and respect for books. and that's a great cornerstone on which you can build. i also forgot he built himself his own scanning station. so, as for his "shortcomings", i think it boils down to 2. the first is that he's "frugal", as in cheap. the second is an irrationality about open-source, which could probably be related to being cheap, except that irrationality can't be spun as a virtue. (but, of course, such irrationality is fairly common with open-source advocates, which unfortunately mocks the intelligence bedrocking the philosophy.) the combination of these two things leads james to value his time at a very low worth, and that is sad... the proof of this is that, even after he was told -- point-blank, by the d.p./p.g. infrastructure, as he reports in his book -- that tesseract is worthless, he _continued_ to use it for his following projects. as he put it in his book:
since my original page images were of poor quality (due to the age of the book and inadequate lighting) it was difficult to convince anyone that ABBYY Fine Reader would not have done a better job on the OCR than Tesseract. It is possible it would have.
read that again:
It is possible it would have.
there are two ways to interpret that. the first is that he hasn't done the research to verify it. well, hey, james, if that's the case, research it! (or else take the word of the people who did.) the second, more troubling, interpretation is "they say it is so, but i question their wisdom." and _that_ boils down to a sheer irrationality bordering on pure stupidity, akin to "they say the earth is round, but i don't know about that." there's no question about the fact of the matter, james, and you need to face that fact head-on: abbyy finereader does better o.c.r. than tesseract. out of 100 books, finereader will do 95-99 better. i wish it wasn't so lopsided. but that's what it is... *** so, al... those are the two "shortcomings" i see in james -- hey, i'm sure he can see a lot more in me! -- :+) but neither of them affects his ability to pull off a digitization of this book. he has the tenacity... i agree that his inability to see the difficulty that he was causing himself by rewrapping the text _before_ he did the proofing was quite glaring, but i think he now sees the error of the practice. plus i hope he now knows the truth of tesseract. so i think we need to give him full credit now... (as if my "credit" will buy him anything!) ;+) *** james, the other "problem" i had with your book has nothing to do with the book per se, but with your co-author -- rebecca "webchick" malamud. back when i was trying to communicate with the internet archive people, she was working there... at first, she was all _nice_ and everything to me, but once she learned that i wasn't going to just "go away" after lodging my complaints, she got rather mean and even did some attacks on me... so until she apologizes to me, i don't like her... that, of course, doesn't have to have any bearing on _our_ relationship... unless you want it to... but it sounds like she might not be a close friend. (if she is, you should ask her if she has finereader, and if she'll be willing to do some o.c.r. for you.) *** more to come shortly, as we get back to the work... -bowerbird