Consistent Correlation Between Book Page and Type Area
from Moleskinerie
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Proofreading as a hobby
I like checking up on Blackmask.com every now and then to see the latest public domain e-books that have been posted. I read e-books on my Clie using the fabulous iSilo and Blackmask thoughtfully provides the books in various formats (text, HTML, iSilo, Mobipocket, etc.) for reading on digital devices.
I think they've probably got the whole run of Doc Savage and most of The Shadow--pulp adventures seem to be their specialty--in addition to the run-of-the-mill stuff you see from Project Gutenberg: many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore: novels, poetry, antiquated reference books, old literary magazines, and other paper ephemera digitized for the new age.
If you've got an interest in an old author, Blackmask is a great first source to check--even my local public library doesn't have all these Arnold Bennett books. If you can't find what you want there, try Gutenberg; I'm not sure how much overlap exists between the two.
Whenever I visited Blackmask, I was always intrigued by the banner ads on their page that read "GO PROOF A PAGE, WE'LL WAIT RIGHT HERE FOR YOU". So a few weeks ago, I clicked on this link and was whisked to the Distributed Proofreaders site. The DP site is a volunteer-run group that proofs the OCR scans of old books and magazines that will eventually find their way to the Project Gutenberg site (and Blackmask).
The idea is that you volunteer to be a proofreader, working at your computer, on your own time, and you can proof as many pages as you want (they hope you do at least one a day). The scans can range from messy to clean, and there's an extensive set of guidelines to adapt and interpret the scanned text so that it compiles nicely for electronic reading. (I printed out the one-page summary to keep in my "Fingertip" folder by my computer.)
Beginners can try out the books ranked as EASY; friendly mentors let you know where you can improve your technique; and as your number of proofed pages increase, other bits of the site become accessible to you, such as a random proofing guideline on your login page.
I very much like the new filtering option: when I log in, I now see only books in English of average difficulty. I didn't realize there were so many other languages that were involved in this effort: Dutch, Spanish, Tagalog, as well as blends of English and other languages.
This proofing I'm doing is what's called the "first round"; the big problems are cleaned up here, obvious errors fixed, standard formatting entered. So far, I've proofed about 40 pages. After I've proofed 100 pages, I'm eligible to do second-round proofs, working as another pair of eyes to ensure the first-rounders didn't let certain niceties slip by them.
As I should have expected, there is an active and lively sub-culture on display at the forums. I recently discovered there are "index junkies," who seek out the clean-up and codification of scanned indexes. These guys like a challenge. Another forum member likes to do the 2-column literary magazine scans (such as of the Civil War-era Atlantic magazines), because they require more hands-on work and are in need of closer proofing.
So far, I've shied away from some of the really complicated pages that blend italicized Latin and Greek words along with footnotes, annotations, glosses, illustrations, lists, and the like. I prefer to do whatever can be done in 30 minutes or so. I feel a good satisfaction at taming a chaotic page and making it look and read sensibly. And for a bookworm, there's no better cause than to keep a book going.
If you don't like reading on a computer screen, then this may not be something you want to do. But if you're spending a ton of time at the PC anyway, it's at least as interesting as reading RSS feeds, and I daresay a touch more useful.
Update: I neglected to mention that I use Netcaptor for my proofreading. Netcaptor is a tabbed browser based on the IE engine. When I proofread, I have one tab holding the scanned page and the OCR text beneath; one tab dedicated to the forum post discussing the book; and one tab dedicated to the big Guidelines page. I can also open other tabs if I need to Google a spelling or odd word. I have a Netcaptor group, "Proofreading," that loads the basic tabs in an instant. You can use Mozilla as well, but I'm more comfortable with Netcaptor, as I've used it for years.
For complicated scans, I open Notetab Pro (a tabbed Windows-based text editor), copy the scanned text there, and do my editing.
DP also offers an especially ugly monospaced font that they encourage you to use when you proof. It's heinous, but it helps flag misspelled words that would look familiar if you scanned them too fast.
Update, 17 May 2005 Since first writing this, I've not been back to Distributed Proofreading for a few months. At the time I started, I was unemployed and had the time to devote to it. But then I did get a job and then "life" happened, on several fronts, that took my time and energy away from recreational things.
I listed out all the available activities I could do of a day or an evening, and I divided them into High Payoff and Low Payoff activities. Sadly, DProofreading fell into the Low Payoff category. After classifying proofreading as a low-payoff, I rarely returned. Too bad.
I think they've probably got the whole run of Doc Savage and most of The Shadow--pulp adventures seem to be their specialty--in addition to the run-of-the-mill stuff you see from Project Gutenberg: many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore: novels, poetry, antiquated reference books, old literary magazines, and other paper ephemera digitized for the new age.
If you've got an interest in an old author, Blackmask is a great first source to check--even my local public library doesn't have all these Arnold Bennett books. If you can't find what you want there, try Gutenberg; I'm not sure how much overlap exists between the two.
Whenever I visited Blackmask, I was always intrigued by the banner ads on their page that read "GO PROOF A PAGE, WE'LL WAIT RIGHT HERE FOR YOU". So a few weeks ago, I clicked on this link and was whisked to the Distributed Proofreaders site. The DP site is a volunteer-run group that proofs the OCR scans of old books and magazines that will eventually find their way to the Project Gutenberg site (and Blackmask).
The idea is that you volunteer to be a proofreader, working at your computer, on your own time, and you can proof as many pages as you want (they hope you do at least one a day). The scans can range from messy to clean, and there's an extensive set of guidelines to adapt and interpret the scanned text so that it compiles nicely for electronic reading. (I printed out the one-page summary to keep in my "Fingertip" folder by my computer.)
Beginners can try out the books ranked as EASY; friendly mentors let you know where you can improve your technique; and as your number of proofed pages increase, other bits of the site become accessible to you, such as a random proofing guideline on your login page.
I very much like the new filtering option: when I log in, I now see only books in English of average difficulty. I didn't realize there were so many other languages that were involved in this effort: Dutch, Spanish, Tagalog, as well as blends of English and other languages.
This proofing I'm doing is what's called the "first round"; the big problems are cleaned up here, obvious errors fixed, standard formatting entered. So far, I've proofed about 40 pages. After I've proofed 100 pages, I'm eligible to do second-round proofs, working as another pair of eyes to ensure the first-rounders didn't let certain niceties slip by them.
As I should have expected, there is an active and lively sub-culture on display at the forums. I recently discovered there are "index junkies," who seek out the clean-up and codification of scanned indexes. These guys like a challenge. Another forum member likes to do the 2-column literary magazine scans (such as of the Civil War-era Atlantic magazines), because they require more hands-on work and are in need of closer proofing.
So far, I've shied away from some of the really complicated pages that blend italicized Latin and Greek words along with footnotes, annotations, glosses, illustrations, lists, and the like. I prefer to do whatever can be done in 30 minutes or so. I feel a good satisfaction at taming a chaotic page and making it look and read sensibly. And for a bookworm, there's no better cause than to keep a book going.
If you don't like reading on a computer screen, then this may not be something you want to do. But if you're spending a ton of time at the PC anyway, it's at least as interesting as reading RSS feeds, and I daresay a touch more useful.
Update: I neglected to mention that I use Netcaptor for my proofreading. Netcaptor is a tabbed browser based on the IE engine. When I proofread, I have one tab holding the scanned page and the OCR text beneath; one tab dedicated to the forum post discussing the book; and one tab dedicated to the big Guidelines page. I can also open other tabs if I need to Google a spelling or odd word. I have a Netcaptor group, "Proofreading," that loads the basic tabs in an instant. You can use Mozilla as well, but I'm more comfortable with Netcaptor, as I've used it for years.
For complicated scans, I open Notetab Pro (a tabbed Windows-based text editor), copy the scanned text there, and do my editing.
DP also offers an especially ugly monospaced font that they encourage you to use when you proof. It's heinous, but it helps flag misspelled words that would look familiar if you scanned them too fast.
Update, 17 May 2005 Since first writing this, I've not been back to Distributed Proofreading for a few months. At the time I started, I was unemployed and had the time to devote to it. But then I did get a job and then "life" happened, on several fronts, that took my time and energy away from recreational things.
I listed out all the available activities I could do of a day or an evening, and I divided them into High Payoff and Low Payoff activities. Sadly, DProofreading fell into the Low Payoff category. After classifying proofreading as a low-payoff, I rarely returned. Too bad.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
The Warden and Barchester Towers
After listening to Trollope's Autobiography via Audible, I got a Bantam paperback edition from Nice Price Books (local used-book store) and searched on the web for any secondary reading. I ran across the Trollope-l mailing list and this site, which is an entryway to many writings, factoids, and discussions on Trollope's novels.
And I found what I was looking for here, which archives various threads from the Trollope-l mailing list regarding specifically these two novels. (They're usually included together as a single book.) Lots of folks on this list who loo-o-oove Trollope and have a deep level of knowledge about that period of English history. It's interesting to see people's reactions to Mr. Harding and Dr. Grantley and some of the scenes that just don't come off (such as the party at Harding's home).
After the ups and downs of the last few months, it's good to settle into a book that has a rather stately pace and isn't huffing and puffing for effect or cheap thrills. Not to say it isn't melodramatic. But there's a charm to it that's undeniable. The last novel I read before this was Stephen King's The Dark Tower, which was so good it kind of ruined me for novel-reading for a week or two, as I was reluctant to let that world go. I've only been affected a few times like that--Lee Smith's Oral History was another book that scoured out my insides and left me ruined for about two weeks, before I felt I could pick up another novel.
And I found what I was looking for here, which archives various threads from the Trollope-l mailing list regarding specifically these two novels. (They're usually included together as a single book.) Lots of folks on this list who loo-o-oove Trollope and have a deep level of knowledge about that period of English history. It's interesting to see people's reactions to Mr. Harding and Dr. Grantley and some of the scenes that just don't come off (such as the party at Harding's home).
After the ups and downs of the last few months, it's good to settle into a book that has a rather stately pace and isn't huffing and puffing for effect or cheap thrills. Not to say it isn't melodramatic. But there's a charm to it that's undeniable. The last novel I read before this was Stephen King's The Dark Tower, which was so good it kind of ruined me for novel-reading for a week or two, as I was reluctant to let that world go. I've only been affected a few times like that--Lee Smith's Oral History was another book that scoured out my insides and left me ruined for about two weeks, before I felt I could pick up another novel.
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Monthly splurge list
I copied this tip from some money-management page online:
After having this squib in my Yahoo Notepad for a couple of years, I think, I finally figured out how to implement it. In my Clie's Memopad "Lists" category, I have a memo titled (ta-da) "Splurges."
In this memo, I list each month's name. Then, under each month, I list one or two splurge items I'm interested in. But, I also use this list to record my impulse buys and splurges I make throughout the month. I was quietly shocked at how many little items I bought for myself in February; none of them individually expensive, but taken en masse, most disquieting. I think when I'm busy, I have less time to shop and spend.
In any case, when I look at this list during my GTD weekly review, or when I'm hit with the urge to treat myself to something, I am naturally moved to consider my spending habits.
Impulse purchases are always the things that trip up our budgets and cause us to overspend. You may not be able to avoid impulse purchases all the time, but you can limit them by rewarding yourself each month with something that you really want. Decide on something that you really want each month. When the impulse hits you to spend, ask yourself do I want this impulse item more than I want my designated reward. If the answer is no, set aside that money for your monthly reward. The reward should be something that you consider a real luxury or frivolous item. While it does not need to be expensive, it should be somewhat whimsical so that you feel that you have indeed rewarded yourself.
After having this squib in my Yahoo Notepad for a couple of years, I think, I finally figured out how to implement it. In my Clie's Memopad "Lists" category, I have a memo titled (ta-da) "Splurges."
In this memo, I list each month's name. Then, under each month, I list one or two splurge items I'm interested in. But, I also use this list to record my impulse buys and splurges I make throughout the month. I was quietly shocked at how many little items I bought for myself in February; none of them individually expensive, but taken en masse, most disquieting. I think when I'm busy, I have less time to shop and spend.
In any case, when I look at this list during my GTD weekly review, or when I'm hit with the urge to treat myself to something, I am naturally moved to consider my spending habits.
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