Page History

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• bring text to play with in Voyant

Anatomy and Physiology of a Digital Book

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Going down a rabbit hole: anatomy of a digital book

How is a digital book made?  How does the structure relate to it's functionality? What opportunities does this afford us in terms of text analysis?

Let's consider this book: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  Explore the controls on the right side of the page turner.  

• Note the different views of the book. What types of digital files do you think it likely that a digital book is composed of?
• How are the files likely to be made?
• What functions might each type facilitate?

Now consider the controls at he top of the page turner, and explore those. 

• There is a box labeled "search in this text".  What can you deduce about the book from this functionality? 
• The arrows move the view back and forth in the book. The sections allow for jumping to chapter starts.  What must enable this function? (Food for thought...)

What might this page be?  Is this also part of the book? 

OCR processes are not perfect.

• image resolution
• language specific challenges
• font styles
• handwriting
• Unexpected arrangement
• What our eyes like to read is images
• What machines read  needs to be constrained and predictable:"machine actionable"
• Books have metadata -
  
  • bibliographic (catalog view, MARC view)
  • structural
• OCR - where does it come from?
• OCR issues
language specific challenges

• Roman/non Roman
• Special character sets: Japanese done well, and not so well
• Mixed languages: Latin/Greek 
• font styles
• image resolution
handwriting

What are the opportunity points that the structure and arrangement of a book afford?

• Which of the views in HathiTrust are easiest read by humans?
• Which can be read by machines?

We count words - tokenization; why tokenize?

• What is a word? (spaces are like any other character for a machine)
• What isn't a word? 
  
  • Punctuation
  • page numbers
  • grammatical constructs of various languages (ex: negation, especially in French; passive reflexive in Spanish)
• What words do we prefer not to count?
  
  • headers/footers
  • preface
  • indexes
  • title pages
  • abstracts

Introducing Control - "Microanalysis" and Voyant

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