Page History

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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?

(1) 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?

(2) 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...)

(3) What might this page be?  (It also has this view.) Is this also part of the book? 

Diving deeper into plaintexttext: OCR processes are not perfect.

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• poor image quality (resolution, warp, skew, crop)
• language specific challenges - Arapaho gospel of St. Luke
• books where characters vary - handwritten manuscripts, block printed books
• font styles
• Unexpected arrangement
• Roman/non Roman
• Special character sets: Japanese done well, and not so well
• Mixed languages: Latin/Greek, German/Greek Greek

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

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We count words - tokenization; why tokenize?

Let's look again at the Arapaho gospel of St. Luke.  Switch to text view.

• 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

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