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Re: A Modest Proposal

From: James D. Keeline <keeline~at~adnc.com>
Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2000 15:50:46 -0800
To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~math.technion.ac.il>

"Arthur B. Evans" wrote:
>
> Norm,
>
> Both your and James's points are well taken. It appears that the necessary
> modus operandi would thus be:
> 1. establish a solid bibliography of unabridged English translations
> 2. identify the best translations among them
> 3. obtain scannable copies of these texts
> 4. scan them
> 5. make them available to PG and the world
> As you have seen, I have already begun to tackle the first two tasks. But
> it will take a very long time to compare all these translations against the
> originals--months, maybe years. And, because of cost, there will inevitably
> be many that I won't be able to examine at all.
>
> Best,
> Art

Art, if you have a preliminary list which you want to publish, I can
develop a simple web page for it. From that we can try to obtain the
scans. I would guess that the following info would be needed to begin
with:

        French Title and Publication Info (serial and book dates)

and for each major translation (perhaps even including the abridged ones
in the Fitzroy series mainly because they are so widely available).

        Name of Translator or Identifying Characteristic

        Title(s) under which each translation was published along with
          basic publication information (ie publisher, year).

        Essential characteristics which make this translation unique.

        First paragraph from book.

        Evaluation of the quality of the tranlation and any notes which
        relate to this.

Obviously this would have to be a cooperative effort and we can follow
each submitted comment/entry with the initials of the person who offered
the opinion/information. This could be linked to a master list of con-
tributors with e-mail links.

Norm, I have some questions about the scanning/OCR process:

        Which programs have the best performance to cost ratio for the
        OCR end of things?

        Do the programs prefer grayscale or bitmap images for scanning?

        Is it better to adjust the images for a very white page and very
        black text?

        Are there programs which can take the filenames of a particular
        structure and process them automatically? If so, we might want
        to have names which facilitate this (for example, a file name
        could be Mysterious_Island_001.tif). I am a Mac person but I am
        trying to consider the special needs of the Windows environment.

James
http://www.keeline.com/
Received on Thu 10 Feb 2000 - 01:53:24 IST

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