Saturday Notes

by Cliopatria

Paul Duguid,"Inheritance and loss: A brief survey of Google Books," first Monday, August, uses Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to illustrate his highly critical evaluation of Google Books' accomplishment and failure. For responses to Duguid's article, see: Peter Brantley, Ben Vershbow, and, less positively, Dan Cohen.

Belgrade's Ružica Church, which was rebuilt after World War I, is lit by two chandeliers made of spent bullet casings, swords, and cannon parts. See: D,"The Lethal Chandeliers of Ružica Church," Curious Expeditions, 16 August, for that and other fine examples of"trench art."

Errol Morris,"Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up," Zoom, 15 August, looks at the misidentification of the victim in the most famous photograph from Abu Ghraib.

From Dragon Management, who comments at Dave Davisson's Patahistory,"I IZ N UR YOONIVURSITEES, TEECHIN UR CHILREN, REESERCHIN STUFF WIT UR BENJAMINS."

Finally, on behalf of my fellow Methodists, I say:"Eat mor baptis. They fat. They juci. They dilicius."

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Andrew D. Todd - 12/5/2007

A renewed round of discussion, not too many new ideas per se, but interesting mostly on the grounds of the sheer mental intransigence some people are displaying.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071129/123906.shtml
http://paulcourant.net/2007/11/04/on-being-in-bed-with-google/

Andrew D. Todd - 8/19/2007

The time I broke my arm, and couldn't type very well for a while, I tried to fill up the gap by dictating audiotapes and taking them along to a business secretarial firm. The results came back looking rather like the material in Dave Davisson's Patahistory piece. A typist does not transcribe literally, but does something very much like language translation. Obviously, if the typist is sufficiently illiterate and poorly educated... my guess is that the author of the passage dictated it, and passed it along for transcription. In this day and age, a good typist is hard to find.

Ralph E. Luker - 8/19/2007

mmm ... fruit cake!

Nathanael D. Robinson - 8/19/2007

Ralph, do you use the blood of young baptists to make Christmas fruit cake?

Andrew D. Todd - 8/19/2007

Well, my reasonably defensible estimate of the cost of scanning ten million books de novo would be something like fifty million dollars, perhaps considerably less. In terms of the kind of money that Microsoft is blowing on videogame consoles, that is petty cash. What it comes down to is that, due to competitive pressures, video game consoles have to be sold for $100-200 less than they cost to make, and tens of millions of the things are being sold. The resulting deficits run into billions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com

By industrial standards, the cost of digitizing the library is small, to the point of triviality. There are at least ten parties (Microsoft, Novell, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, E-Bay, Apple, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Intel, Cisco Networks, inter alia) who can either run their own digitization projects or contribute to a common open project. There's a competing "open library" organization, centered around Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive, which does general coordination, collects funds, etc. All of these firms are in a state of mutual jealousy, and if one doesn't move, another will. That's what happens across the board, and there is no obvious reason that library digitization should be different. However, universities are not organized along industrial lines, and most academics don't seem to think in financier's terms. There's this whole culture of "petty grantsmanship," with people going through committees to get things which cost a hundred dollars.

Ralph E. Luker - 8/19/2007

I think that's right, Andrew. But I wonder if there isn't a critical difference between now and then. With the burst of the dot.com bubble, do we still have multiple centers of power and resources who are capable of doing what Google Books has done and, then, alternative centers that will improve on it? Is there competition at the top on something like this or will Google Books simply claim to have done it and have the power, either by law or economic power, to defy anyone from competing to improve on it?

Andrew D. Todd - 8/18/2007

Paul Duguid's fallacy is in his assumption that Google Books is the definitive and final transfer of the printed corpus to the internet. However, electronic cameras are getting better, and cheaper, and easier to use. Competing firms, notably Microsoft and Amazon, are sponsoring alternatives to Google Books.

I have found from experience that photocopies obtained from interlibrary loan are usually pretty bad. The person doing the copying, generally a work-study student drawing minimum wage, simply does not have the incentive to tweak the photocopying machine to get the best possible results. My own photocopies, mostly of things like bound periodicals, were as good as I could make them, but they often left a lot to be desired. It is not as if the existing means were all that perfect.

Some years ago, I encountered an article by a graduate student of English who had attempted to use On-Line Business Systems' WYLBUR text-editing program as what we would now call a word processor. Her conclusion was that computers were worthless. I don't know if anyone here has hands-on experience of WYLBUR. Unless you have programmed mainframe computers such as the old IBM 370 before 1985 or so, it is not likely that you have. Suffice it to say that WYLBUR justified every malediction flung at it. However, in the long run, better software came along.

The really difficult issue is the human problem, the active or passive resistance by people who are terrified of the idea that anyone could be allowed to read any book. Umberto Eco satirized this attitude in his character of the librarian in _The Name of the Rose_, set in a Benedictine monastery in the early fourteenth century. The librarian is also terrified of the new universities where students do not necessarily have to be churchmen; he is terrified of the new mendicant orders, such as the Franciscans, and of change in general. Obviously, Eco had met someone like this in the flesh at some point. I am reminded of a remark I once heard Edward Ayers make, to the effect that digitization means tossing away your mantle of seeming infallibility. He was referring to archival material, but the principle applies more broadly. What Google is doing is mostly running interference against the "monastic librarian mentality." After Google sweeps through, the question is not whether a book shall be digitized, but whether a better version shall be digitized. On those terms, the answer is obviously yes, and the only question is how to mobilize a human-wave attack on the problem. For example, you can make work of that sort a requirement in Freshman English and History of Western Civilization, and teach every student how to do document photography.