[Ads-l] EEBO

[Charles C Doyle]

A professor whose dual specialties are "humanities computing" and historical bibliography once told me that the EEBO transcriptions have been done by non-English-speaking sweatshop laborers in the Philippines.

An "urban" (academic) legend?

--Charlie

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Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
Subject:      Re: EEBO
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Are the transcribers not as well-versed in early modern fonts as
EEBO-TCP claims?  Or are the transcribers starting with
OCR-transcriptions, and "correcting" those?

Joel


At 2/4/2015 02:14 PM, ADSGarson O'Toole wrote:
>Bill Mullins kindly pointed out that the transcriptions of the Early
>English Books Online database are now available to all. Recently, I
>was examining some lines from a translation by John Dryden of the "The
>Aeneid" and encountered a word that seems to be incorrectly
>transcribed.
>
>Year: 1697
>Title: The works of Virgil containing his Pastorals, Georgics and
>Aeneis : adorn'd with a hundred sculptures / translated into English
>verse by Mr. Dryden.
>Publication Info: Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, Digital
>Library Production Service.
>Quote Page: 336.
>(Early English Books Online; Text Transcription)
>
>http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A65112.0001.001
>
>[Begin excerpt]
>All obstinate to dye, or gain the Race.
>Rais'd with Success, the Dolphin swistly ran,
>(For they can Conquer who believe they can:)
>[End excerpt]
>
>The page images from EEBO are not publicly available. Yet, I suspect
>that the line about the dolphin should be the following:
>
>[Begin correction]
>Rais'd with Success, the Dolphin swiftly ran,
>[End correction]
>
>Some editions in Google Books contain the word "swiftly".
>It seems odd that page scans of very old manuscripts are still locked up.
>
>Garson
>
>
>On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 6:17 PM, ADSGarson O'Toole
><adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks Bill. Great news. Thanks to the organizations that have enabled
> > access to this database by the hoi polloi.
> >
> > The link in the message from you, Bill, appears to be broken, i.e.,
> > split. So I've placed a short link below.
> >
> > The digital images are still locked up in the ProQuest EEBO database.
> > So a transcription cannot be compared to the digital image unless you
> > have proper access which is difficult to obtain.
> >
> > Date: January 27, 2015
> > Article: U-M helps open more than 25,000 early English books to public
> > Author: Mary Morris
> >
> >
> http://record.umich.edu/articles/u-m-helps-open-more-25k-early-english-books-public
> >
> > http://bit.ly/15Vao3L
> >
> > [Begin excerpt]
> > The transcribed texts, as open data, are freely available for anyone
> > to read, reuse, reproduce, repurpose and distribute. (ProQuest's EEBO
> > image database remains available only to subscribers.)
> > [End excerpt]
> >
> > The EEBO website at eebo.chadwyck.com states that "Individual pricing
> > is not available". Hence, an individual researcher without some kind
> > of affiliation with a major library is handicapped. Many ProQuest
> > databases are hard to access.
> >
> > Garson
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 5:01 PM, Mullins, Bill CIV (US)
> > <william.d.mullins18.civ at mail.mil> wrote:
> >> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> >> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >> Poster:       "Mullins, Bill CIV (US)" <william.d.mullins18.civ at MAIL.MIL>
> >> Subject:      EEBO
> >>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>
> >> The text of Early English Books Online has been transcribed and
> taken from =
> >> behind a paywall.
> >>
> >> http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebogroup/
> >>
> >> Background
> >>
> >>
> http://record.umich.edu/articles/u-m-helps-open-more-25k-early-english-book=
> >> s-public
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