medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
From: Karl-Georg Schon <[log in to unmask]>
> Talking about resources on the web:
>
> Nearly the whole body of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (except volumes
printed less than five years ago) is available under http://www.dmgh.de. So
far there are only fairly good jpgs of the volumes, but it is apparently
planned to have a searchable database at a later stage as well.
thank you, Karl-Georg.
alas, the .jpgs(!) are, indeed, "fairly good" --the text is a bit small for my
old eyes.
as for searchability, i spoke too soon about the Stanford Chevalier .pdf
files.
they are "searchable" because they have been run through an OCR program, but
when i examine a section of the text as an ascii file, i find that there are
an enormous number of errors, as one would expect from a first draft straight
from an OCR session --most of the text is there, but not all of it. this is,
partly, a function of the complex typography and the poor state of the fonts
used.
some folks talk about putting whole libraries on-line, but it seems to me that
those folks have never had any experience trying to OCR an older (pre-20th c.)
book.
working in the MGH's favor is the fact that those tomes are exceptionally well
printed, with clear typography --unlike, say, the volumes of the PL, which are
nearly hopeless to OCR.
the digitalised PL was done, i am told, by sending the volumes to Calcutta,
where they were keystroked in by human druges, where two seperate copies were
made of each page; the ascii texts of these two were then compared by a
computer program, and the variants between the two resolved by a human being
who looked back at the text, making the correction.
i have yet to find an error in that on-line PL but, statistically, it stands
to reason that two typists would have made the same mistake at least a few
times, in all those 200+ volumes.
c
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