I have been working on a translation here at the public library in Birmingham, Alabama. There are large murals painted on the interior walls of the research library where I am sitting as I write this and it struck me that I couldn’t figure out what concept united all the murals.
They were painted by Ezra Winter back in the 1920s. Each mural appears to be representing a nation or culture, but I was puzzled by the choices made.
To represent the English we had Lancelot, a fictitious legendary figure. The Russians got Igor, the Spanish got Don Quixote, the Germans got Faust and Margaret. I thought the theme was fictional characters from literary works, but there were real historical figures as well: John Smith and Pocahontas for Americans, Dante and Virgil for Italians (though I realize they are probably taken from within the Divine Comedy), and Confucius for the Chinese. See the full list here.
I concluded that they were all chosen as figures which might reasonably pop up, fictional or otherwise in a classical education. However, I still found the choices somewhat bizarre when juxtaposed with the nation or culture they are supposed to represent.
I confess I didn’t recognize the characters for Japan: Otohime and Urashima Tarô, until I looked up the familiar story (J) online. The two are apparently now available in Hello Kitty versions.
The only Otohime I remember coming across in Japan was the device occasionally found in bathrooms to conceal the noise of one’s bowel movements. Only now do I realize that the name was not just a “Sound Princess” (音姫) but was at least potentially an additional play on the pronunciation of a version of the name of the mythical characther (乙姫).
My father, an American born in Alabama, visits his relatives there once a year. Since I left the Boston area last week my major goal before leaving for Korea next month is to finish a translation project I’m working on, something I can do any quiet place. I decided to join my father on his trip this year, since a journey to the South is never without interesting discoveries.
I have been paying a little more attention to the vocabulary and rich expressions that are used around here. I don’t always have a pen handy, but I will try to keep a running list in this posting of those expressions I remember to write down when I hear them.
NOTE: I did not grow up in the United States, so it is possible that much of what strikes me as unusual is in fact quite common all over the country.
Expressions:
• “Smelling high on the bush” = Stage of childhood when boys begin expressing romantic interest in girls. [Note: Not sure if it is used in the reverse case]
• “I’ll cut your gubber off” [Note: Pronounced goober] = A threat made to misbehaving children.
• “Loose as a Goose” = To be very relaxed.
• “Fine as Frog Hair” = To be doing very well.
• “Slick as a spanked baby’s bottom”
• “[Busy|Nervous] as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs”
• “Get above your raisin’” = Trying to live above one’s social station.
• “Hanging on like hair on a biscuit” = To be doing OK, to be stubbornly hanging on (to life, health, etc.), as a hair does in the dough of a southern biscuit.
Vocabulary:
• Hen Fruit = Eggs
Updated: June 3, 2007
Congraulations to Sayaka on finishing her comprehensive exams. Also, Sayaka has moved her weblog to a new location just as she is moving from her PhD program in Political Science at The George Washington University in Washington DC to her new History PhD program at New York’s Columbia University. The title of her new blog (with old entries imported) is chosen in honor of her favorite Italian revolutionary.
During the past year or so, and especially in the last few weeks, I owe a great deal of thanks to a machine I call a PDF scanner, since I don’t know what it normally called.
The scanner looks like a photocopy machine with a computer screen attached to it. Like a regular photocopy machine you can use the glass or the feeder on top to copy documents and books at the same speed as you might expect from such a machine. However, instead of charging you money and outputting these copies on regular paper, the result of the free scan is displayed as thumbnails on the screen to the right. When you are happy with the resulting scans, you may save them together as a PDF (or as separate image files) and have the file sent to a USB drive or to a server of your choice via FTP.
The machine can be set to a number of resolutions (200 dpi and up) and scans in black and white, grayscale, or color. You may also indicate the paper size of the scanned image. If you are using the feeder tray, you may scan either single or double-sided documents. The model I have used on campus does not have shrink or enlargement features available and lacks some of the other advanced features we are used to dealing with on a regular photocopy machine. However, if you are scanning English language documents, there is one wonderful extra feature: Putting a check next to “Hidden Text Layer” will direct the machine to OCR the scanned pages of text and make the PDF documents searchable. The accuracy is far from perfect, but more than good enough to make those usually dead images great for keyword searching.
This machine, and in one case a different variation of it, can now be found at several library locations throughout the Harvard campus. Competition for its use is heavy in some libraries, especially those where visiting researchers are desperate to copy materials before they return home and want to avoid the costs of large amounts of photocopying and the weight of carrying these copies back.
The advantages of this machine are huge:
1. Use of the machine is completely free (at least on our campus). This has probably saved me hundreds of dollars in the past year and a half or so.
2. Except when scanning poor quality documents or large amounts of double-sided documents using the feeder tray, there are far fewer jams and other problems which arise with using a photocopy machine.
3. There is no wasting of paper or ink. No paper also means no lugging around heavy photocopies.
4. The scans are at a very high speed and surpass the speed of any but the most expensive personal scanners and is much faster than most document feeding trays I have seen.
5. The scanner’s glass is much larger than all but the most expensive personal scanners and can thus easily handle very large books.
6. The OCR text recognition provides no opportunity for correcting mistakes but is transparently built into the scanning process. You never actually see it happen. It adds only a short time to the final saving of the document as it is transferred to the USB drive. This dramatically reduces the time the OCR process would take if you were to do it after scanning documents on a personal scanner with something like OmniPage Pro or using Adobe Acrobat Professional or other tools.
7. Easy OCR means searchable PDFs which means faster research through your own scanned materials.
Potential general complaints from the perspective of librarians and researchers:
1. The product is a scan – which you view on a screen. This is less fun to read than on paper and less convenient to annotate and scribble on.
2. Free and fast copying means that violating copyrights in the library is now free and fast too. Since the products are PDF files, rather than a single hard copy, it is easier than ever to distribute these PDF in ways that violate copyrights.
What have I found this useful for?
1. I digitized the entire Sino-Japanese studies journal, which is now hosted online. I have been wanting to do this project with Josh Fogel for a long time and only with the introduction of these PDF scanners around campus has it become something manageable with a limited budget of time.
2. I have boxes upon boxes of photocopies that I have made throughout the years. Dragging them around is a pain. The PDF scanner has allowed me to eliminated several boxes of paper (I simply haven’t had the time to go through them all, and I want to keep some highlighted materials and materials that don’t scan well). These documents are now all on my computer, and backed up on other media.
3. I often take handouts from presentations, various mail and personal documents, and scan them up quickly using the document feeder.
4. Any books I might need to have as reference in the field but which I don’t want to bring with me in my baggage, I simply scan up before I go. It takes me about 30 minutes to scan a 300 page book, or about ten pages per minute. It takes another 2 minutes to save the book if you choose black and white at 200 dpi. This means that many of my favorite history books in my field are not only on my computer, but those in English are easily searchable, thanks to the OCR feature included on the machine. I can then leave the original book in storage while I travel around in East Asia. When you are sitting in an archive or on a train in the middle of nowhere, without any internet connection or access to Google books and other search engines – there is nothing like being able to search through a lot of locally stored data on one’s own machine.
Wish List for the Future
1. As more and more people around Harvard campus discover the power of these machines to reduce paper and produce OCRed PDF files of everything from our personal papers, I have watched as competition for their use has exploded – especially for the PDF scanner in Harvard-Yenching library. I hope that the librarians come to see that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and add more machines to the collection. I would also love to see PDF scanners in libraries and especially archives around the world. The National Archives, for example, is perfectly happy to have me click away with my personal camera at thousands and thousands of pages of articles but still charges considerable photocopying fees. If the archives had a PDF scanner (perhaps the alternative kind found in Harvard’s Widener library Philip Reading room which is face-up rather than face-down and thus less damaging to books) they could seriously cut on machine maintenance fees while providing an incredibly valuable service to researchers.
Obviously the question of copyright needs to be addressed – but the solution is not to cripple the gains from technology advances that improve on existing tools that perform the same essential task: the paper-based photocopier, the slower personal scanner, and the camera, all of which we have had for years.
2. I would love to see these machines support OCR in many more languages.
3. It would be nice for there to be some kind of semi-automated “submission” or “registration” system for scanned materials so that eventually you can reduce the physical burden on the scanned materials in libraries and archives. If certain pages, articles, or archival documents have been scanned before, and are found in the system, then you could simply retrieve this previously scanned document and thereby contribute the preservation of the original by not subjecting it further copy.
4. I would like these machines to have more options than the software they currently have provide such as enlarge/shrink options, crop features, auto-crop features, more media size options, much better color scans of glossy photographs, etc.
Honorable Mention
Another similar machine that I also owe a lot to recently is the Microfilm PDF scanner. A number of my recent postings at Frog in a Well and contributions to the Frog in a Well Library refer to documents that I found on microfilms. The documents I have been uploading are PDFs directly created by the PDF scanning software on the computers attached to the microfilm reading machines that I use in the Government Documents section in the basement of Harvard’s Lamont library. It works very much like the microfilm printers we have seen in libraries for years but this time the product is a PDF rather than paper copies. Like the regular PDF scanner above, all these scans are free and allow me to easily share my findings with others.
In the past I have repeatedly complained about claims of copyright protection where no such protection exists.
I have talked about this problem on Google Books, where books are not given full view when they are fully in the public domain or where public domain books republished by Kessinger Publishing are used which wrongly claim copyright protection. A recent critique of Google Books by a blogger at the AHA has mentioned a similar problem in a posting here.
I have also expressed my frustration with the new Footnote.com service which gives access to completely public domain documents through a paid service and then forbids the viewers to copy and freely use this completely unprotected and public domain content through their restrictive licensing agreement. This is part of the trend towards using licenses to restrict the usage of materials which cannot otherwise be defended by copyright.
Isn’t it enough that we have to face an unjustifiably long lasting copyright protection laws, and various other blocks to the increasing potential for cultural innovation and information sharing provided by the internet?
Well, this problem isn’t limited to the online world. I have been looking at a lot of microfilms lately of US government documents, mostly from the US State Department. These are documents I can usually see the originals of by visiting the National Archives. Almost all of these documents, that is, any documents produced by the US Government, are completely in the public domain and no publisher or individual can “legally assert copyright unless the publisher or individual has added original, copyright protected material.”
So explain to me why it is that University Publications of America, which created the microfilms of these US government archival records, can get away with proclaiming their copyright on the microfilm reel (Click picture to view larger version):
Even if they could claim copyright on messages they put at the beginning of the microfilm, which is hardly what I think the law has in mind when it says “original material,” then they copyright does not extend to the materials held within. I don’t think that reproductions of these public domain documents in this photographic form, is in anyway original. Furthermore, when there are copyrighted materials (there are scanned published books in the possession of the state department, for example), UPA can hardly claim copyright over such materials, even if I’m grateful that they include such scans in the microfilm, possibly in violation of the copyrights on those materials.
Look at this warning they put in:
Even if we let them have their copyright on this page of the reel, I don’t understand how UPA has any right to graciously “grant” me permission to make enlarged photocopies of only selected items, or deny me the right to make a reel duplication of almost the entire reel, except their introductory frames. Where do they get this right over the material? If these are public domain materials, I should be able to duplicate and use these materials in any way I see fit, whether it is selected photocopies, or print outs, or by copying every single unprotected page within the reel. I should have this right whether I’m engaged in research, or even if I wished to publish a book (without asserting copyright) with the entire public domain contents shown.
These kind of false claims help contribute to the “permission culture” that we find ourselves in, where we become increasingly paranoid about exchanging ideas and creating new culture that uses the rich variety of materials that we have access to.
