The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0250 Thursday, 30 March 2006
[1] From: Jim Blackie <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 2006 13:57:39 -0500
Subj: Re: T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke
[2] From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 30 Mar 2006 12:27:24 +0100
Subj: Re: 17.0241 T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small Latine &
Lesse Greeke
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Jim Blackie <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 2006 13:57:39 -0500
Subject: 17.0241 T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0241 T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small
Latine & Lesse Greeke
Philip Weller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
>I downloaded Vol. 1, but didn't see the advantage of the PDF file. It's
>tedious to navigate, and either the word search doesn't work, or I
>couldn't figure out how to work it.
The pdf file is apparently a compilation of the TIFF images of the pages
(noted elsewhere); as such, one cannot find "words." There are none, as
far as the search engine knows.
The task must have taken an enormous amount of time and I'm not sure I'd
have felt as generous of my time to assemble the document for others'
use. I appreciate the effort of someone else, however.
Thanks.
Jim Blackie
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 30 Mar 2006 12:27:24 +0100
Subject: 17.0241 T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0241 T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small
Latine & Lesse Greeke
Philip Weller wrote
>I downloaded Vol. 1, but didn't see the advantage
>of the PDF file.
I agree that they're tedious to navigate, but some people like the
one-book-one-file model. I prefer a bunch of TIFFs, each named for the
page it represents.
>either the word search doesn't work,
>or I couldn't figure out how to work it.
It doesn't work. The part of the website that does the searching (the
CGI folder) isn't fully accessible via HTTP: all you can do is ask the
program (in the file "baldwinsearch.cgi") to do its mysterious work and
send you the results. This program doubtless draws upon an ASCII text of
the Baldwin book-made by running the images through Optical Character
Recognition (OCR) software-that's stored somewhere on the site. I can't
find where it's stored, else I'd have hoovered that text up too. This
hiding of what they sometimes call the 'dirty ASCII' that goes with the
images is a bad habit of publishers. Thomson Gale do the same with
their Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) product even though
users have offered to correct the 'dirty ASCII'-it's dirty because OCR
never finds precisely the right words-in return for being allowed see
it. I think they're ashamed of the low quality of the ASCII, which
limitation they're overcoming by using clever 'fuzzy logic' software in
the searching of it.
>Also, the University of Illinois has a copyright statement on
>each page, and I think it ought to be respected.
There we must part company. I can see that Baldwin and his estate have a
claim on the material, but why should the publisher? Perhaps Baldwin
assigned his copyright to the publisher, but if so this wasn't a good
idea. The best advice to academic writers today is to hold onto your
copyright and to grant publishers 'exclusive right to publish' (they're
used to this and will often accede at first asking). It's very hard to
see what claim University of Illinois can have on the electronic version
of what Baldwin wrote. Sure, they took some steps to make a new version
in the new medium, but then so did I in making these PDFs. We can be
tolerably sure that any deal Baldwin made with University of Illinois
back in the 1940s didn't anticipate these electronic versions, so the
publisher can hardly claim that Baldwin gave them the digital rights.
What publishers usually claim is that in the electronic transformation
they've imbued the digital version with their own fresh Intellectual
Property, irrespective of their residual rights from the paper version.
If they believe that electronic transformations can do that, then I
claim that my electronic transformation has repeated the process and
that I've got rights over this material. (Mine's a frivolous claim, of
course, made only to show that their claim is spurious.)
Germaine Greer made a thought-provoking comment a few weeks ago in
relation to Charles Windsor's lawsuit over the publication of his
diaries. She observed that he was discovering what we all already knew
about Intellectual Property, which is that it doesn't exist.
Gabriel Egan
PS In all the detail above, I forgot to mention why it's worth having
your own copy of Baldwin and not relying on the website. The point, of
course, is to be independent of your online connection and of the
website maintainer. It's just the same reason why many of us have paper
libraries in our homes and offices even though we go to much larger
libraries to work.
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