[Ads-l] Jules Feiffer cartoon and Google Newspaper Archive

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

The topic of the Google Newspaper archive was raised on this mailing
list, and I just encountered a relevant problem.

The following quotation has been ascribed to Jules Feiffer who
published cartoons in the Village Voice.

[Begin quotation]
I told the doctor I was overtired, anxiety-ridden, compulsively
active, constantly depressed, with recurring fits of paranoia. Turns
out I'm normal.
[End quotation]

I received an inquiry to trace the quotation above, and I knew that
many issues of the Village Voice were available in the Google
Newspaper Archive. But my searches were unsuccessful. The Google Books
database and the Internet Archive also have collections of Feiffer
cartoons, but my searches were again unsuccessful.

The crucial problem seems to be that Feiffer employed a distinctive
scrawl when he wrote the dialogue / thoughts / comments / captions of
his comics. The optical character recognition algorithms are currently
unable to extract the text he wrote to make it searchable.

If you have any suggestions for performing the task of searching Jules
Feiffer’s cartoons. Please contact me on or off the list.

Garson

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