dorsey film conversion questions and estimate

[Rory M Larson]

Hi Pat,

> Are the slips individually filmed or several at once? John said there
were
> actually 20,000 shots on the film for the larger Dhegiha dictionary
> material, so I guess individually.

I can answer this one, as I recently spent several months
plowing through them for acculturation terms.

No, the 20,000 figure is rough estimate of the total
number of words, and it's probably high.  For the OP
dictionary part, we have 3 reels.  Each reel is
divided into segments of 10 frames.  Each frame
includes typically 4, but often fewer, index card
images.  Reel 1 has at least 148 segments; reel 2
has at least 175 segments; and reel 3 has at least
222 segments.  So the 20,000 word estimate is built
on a calculation like

 (148 + 175 + 222) * 10 * 4 = 21,800 words,

 minus some for frames with only 2 or 3 cards

    = 20,000 words.

(There is usually one word per card, but sometimes
more.  Also, the cards are generally type-written,
though there are many hand-written ones as well,
which are not extremely legible.  I suspect Dorsey
originally wrote his notes on cards by hand, then
typed them on another card, but all these cards
were kept and sorted alphabetically in the same
deck.  So although the handwritten cards are hard
to read, it probably doesn't matter too much as
they are only duplicates of words on the type-written
cards anyway.  If we suppose each word is represented
by both a handwritten card and a type-written card,
we should estimate about 10,000 words in the
collection.  Considering that many of these are
just variously inflected forms of the same verb,
a modern dictionary based on the collection would
have much fewer basic words, possibly on the order
of 5,000.)

For total frames, I think we can figure about
5,500.

Rory