medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Of course, if you are digitising texts there must be some question
whether you need metadata at all...
John Briggs
On 11/08/2010 04:39, Paul Chandler wrote:
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
> Christopher, more vols of Hefele-Leclercq (9 of 11) are available at
> Documenta Catholica Omnia<
> http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/25_90_1809-1893-_Hefele_KJ.html>,
> where there is also a complete (I think) Mansi<
> http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/01_50_1692-1769-_Mansi_JD.html>. These
> are PDFs. DCO seems to be taking their digital texts from elsewhere, often
> from Gallica, along with whatever limitations they have.
>
> Many of these projects, unfortunately, have weird defects. For example,
> among the not-really-amusing problems in Google Books' metadata which have
> been documented by Geoff Nunberg are such as these:
>
> [Date errors]: To take GB's word for it, 1899 was a literary *annus
>> mirabilis*, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler's *Killer in the
>> Rain*, *The Portable Dorothy Parker*, André Malraux' *La Condition Humaine
>> *, Stephen King's *Christine*, *The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia
>> Woolf*, Raymond Williams' *Culture and Society*, Robert Shelton's
>> biography of Bob Dylan, Fodor's Guide to Nova Scotia, and the Portuguese
>> edition of the book version of *Yellow Submarine*, to name just a few.
>>
>
> [Classification errors]: William Dwight Whitney's 1891 *Century
> Dictionary*is classified as "Family& Relationships," along with
> Mencken's
>> *The American Language*. A French edition of *Hamlet* and a Japanese
>> edition of *Madame Bovary* both classified as "Antiques and Collectibles."
>> An edition of *Moby Dick* is classed under "Computers": a biography of Mae
>> West (*An Icon in Black and White*) classified as "Religion"; *The Cat
>> Lover's Book of Fascinating Facts* falls under "Technology& Engineering."
>> A 1975 reprint of a classic topology text is "Didactic Poetry"; the
>> medievalist journal *Speculum* is classified "Health& Fitness".
>>
>
> Some classification errors arise because GB decided to use BISAC
> classifications, which are designed to indicate to booksellers in which
> section books should be shelved in a bookstore, rather than subject headings
> useful to researchers. Others are perhaps the fault of some GB algorithm,
> such as the one which listed Susan Bordo's *Unbearable Weight: Feminism,
> Western Culture and the Body* (misdated 1899, really 2003) under "Health&
> Fitness".
>
> More mysterious is the entry for a book called *The Mosaic Navigator: The
>> essential guide to the Internet Interface*, which is dated 1939 and
>> attributed to Sigmund Freud and Katherine Jones.
>
>
> Nunberg comments: "Beyond clearing up the obvious errors, the larger
> question is whether Google's engineers should be trusted to make all the
> decisions about metadata design and implementation for what will probably
> wind up being the universal library for a long time to come, with no
> contractural obligation, and only limited commercial incentives, to get it
> right... Google Books is unquestionably a public good, but... a great public
> good also implies a great public trust."
>
> Digitization and digital archiving are obviously in their infancy, but the
> haphazardness of much of the enterprise, and its disregard of much of what
> has been learned by librarians since books were stored randomly in chests,
> should be of real concern to researchers in almost every field. -- Paul
> Chandler
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 10 August 2010 23:10, Christopher Crockett<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>>
>> (N.b., Archive.org also has *some* of the vols. of Hefele-Leclercq's
>> wonderful
>> Histoire des conciles... --which is a fine resource.)
>>
>>
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