Week Three Readings

The Lesk readings remind me of my youth, spent working for both ProQuest and the University of Michigan, digitizing print materials. At ProQuest I sat in a Herman Miller Aeron chair and used rendering software (see Lesk’s image of this process) to separate text from images. Then we ran OCR.

At Michigan I worked on an NSF grant much like Cornell’s CLASS that Lesk mentions. I would guillotine the books (sad but true) and ship them to Nogales, Arizona, where they would be taken across the border and digitized. I would get back the pages in TIFF format on CD-ROM, which I would then prepare for OCR. Good times, people.

A question about Lesk: on page 34 there’s a chart that shows the number of online databases diminishing in 1997 and 1998. Anybody know why this is?

Unlike last week, Arms writes in clear, plain English and it’s very easy to following along, surprising given the topic. This chapter about how text and pages are digitally represented was thorough, especially regarding the rise of Unicode and PDFs. Random question, how come Facebook won’t display “>”? It’s ASCII, right?

A question about Lynch: does he conflate identifiers and handles? It certainly seems that way to me. So much so that I went and read some of this week’s background reading just to be clear.

Paskin’s article on DOIs was not exactly a page-turner, but it got the job done and seemed to clear up the relationship between identifiers and handles (A handle is a specific type of DOI). Also important to remember: even if an object is not digital, it can be identified digitally. One reason why DOI matters.