4 thoughts on “Roger and Over

  1. Thank you very much indeed for the link, and your kind words. I don’t think that I’m experiencing a mid-life crisis; it is simply that the internet is becoming a very different animal to what it was in 2000. In many ways that is a good thing; but where does the advent of Google books leave the man with a few hand-scanned texts on his site?

    I shall be most interested to see the answers. Thinking of Bill Thayer, rather than myself, I think that his scanning efforts are still valuable, and far easier to access. Perhaps that is it.

  2. Umm, Roger, I don’t scan text…. I rekey it. Rekeying actually produces fewer typos, and is faster. Asfer Google, well, it’s not up to snuff quite yet, give them another 5-10 years; for now, lotsa volumes 2 and 3 of a 4-volume set, pages skipped, mangled, or duplicated — and of course no useful links, annotation, illustration, etc.

  3. I beg your pardon, Bill. I should have said “digitization”. I have always been in awe of the labour involved in re-keying the lot. On the other hand, you get far higher quality results than I do.

    You’re right about all the problems of Google books. Someone mentioned Athenaeus to me today, about whom I previously knew nothing. It turned out that his 15 books are a treasure store of material about ancient times.

    The Bohn translations are on Google books. But I wanted to get an idea of contents, skim a bit, read a bit. This, I found, was impossible. The access was far too slow, etc, and the OCR’d text not really that searcheable. The Bohn’s scan very badly, in my experience.

    I’m tempted to scan Athenaeus and proof it and create HTML. However I am resisting as best I can!

    It’s bad enough that I got sucked into doing the same for Martial (my current project). That’s a text of enormous interest for the Roman book trade, who suffers badly from our inability to skim over it looking for interesting stuff.

  4. Roger, just saw this now. Athenaeus is on my list, and one small squib of him is a sort of first-offering, put online for a specific link to it. I think I’ll get to him before the end of this year.

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