On 10/10/2012 9:09 AM, Lee Passey wrote:
This file obviously needs a lot of work, and probably is more deserving of attention than many of the recent obscure and esoteric works for which raw page scans are adequate to serve the academic community.
Hey, I read obscure 19th century novels for FUN, and I couldn't read them on my iPod as raw page scans. I don't think I'm the only one. As for the "obscure and esoteric" -- it may be that no one will read those works in their entirety, but good texts make searching possible (as the horrid Google OCR doesn't) and allow researchers to pick out the relevant nugget of info to suggest or confirm a hypothesis. Also, you never know what could be useful. I recall someone posting at DP that an early 20th century periodical on nut tree cultivation had proved very helpful in practice. PG has a history of animosity to scholars and scholarly tastes, which I deplore. -- Karen Lofstrom