For me, at least... Or maybe not at all. The 100th entry posted to The Etude Magazine section just went up: Musical Items from January, 1906. I have an abiding interest in these lists of ephemera from the world of music. I love these lists for their potential to raise obscurities from their shelter. I have cleaned up my scanning and OCR-processing a lot since I started this project, with the biggest leap coming from the purchase of ABBYY's Finereader software. Some of the stories scanned earlier contain obvious errors, but the editing process has been considerably improved since moving to Finereader. If I had any product suggestions for Finereader it would be for a more elegant dual-monitor arrangement. As it is, to take advantage of my 2-monitor setup, I need to spread the aplication across the screens, and this is pretty janky. A split screen or floating screen arrangement, with the scanned pages on the left and the text on the right, might be more usable. As it is, though, I find myself using Word independent of Finereader's text editing screens -- this is because Finereader seems able to use the MS Word custom dictionary but Finereader does not seem to sync with it. Meaning, if I tell Finereader to add a word to the dictionary it does so, but evidently it adds it to a Finereader dictionary? Maybe I am missing something but the words that I "Add to dictionary" in Finereader are still underlined as misspelled in Word. So the use of the MS Word Custom dictionary in Finereader is only partly useful. As for the dual monitor and other vagaries, I, for one, need to increase the page sizes to 500% to make them adequately readable, and this causes troubles in jumping around when I scroll one window. In fact, the mousewheel seems to be a pest to Finereader. In some contexts simply touching it causes the focus to jump from the bottom of a page to the top of the previous page, which can be incredibly aggravating. Maybe the fact that I have the zoom set to 500% is to blame. Whatever the case, I can't complain. Like any piece of software I learn to work with its idiosyncracies. It's all good, though, and the process is not so important as the content, which brings new satisfaction to me with every story posted. I have mixed feelings about leaving typographical errors as they appear in the magazine. I have taken to adding the customary (sic) after an obvious typo, but is not the point of digitizing old text at least partly to make it fluid again, and to take control of it in the digital way? It's as if leaving typos in these old stories is poking fun at the old editors and the old way of copy-editing, where typos were like blemishes. Typos today are easily fixed, and the once expensive infrastructure behind proofreading and editing copy is largely vacated. For now I shall leave the typos, but I might change direction with this later.
April 2010 Archives
Just saying hi, mostly to myself, as I am probably the only live human whose eyes have crossed these web pages. I have not had the time needed to focus on this part of my web universe. Piano playing, studying, learning, and formulating coherent thoughts on the matter are all time-consuming pursuits. Part of my inspiration for creating this site was to document the hive of mental machinations that underlie the act of playing piano. So much code and mechanical translation, converting dots into acts and acts into sounds, the results themselves not even final.
Over on one of my other web sites I recently quoted Julian Jaynes on this matter:
“Here a complex array of various tasks is accomplished all at once with scarcely any consciousness of them whatever: two different lines of near hieroglyphics to be read at once, the right hand guided to one and the left to the other; ten fingers assigned to various tasks, the fingering solving various motor problems without any awareness, and the mind interpreting sharps and flats and naturals into black and white keys, obeying the timing of whole or quarter or sixteenth notes and rests and trills, one hand perhaps in three beats to a measure while the other plays four, while the feet are softening or slurring or holding various other notes.”
Jaynes used the pianist as an example, to illustrate the difference between consciousness and awareness. I think it is generally cliché for non-musicians to use musical metaphors, but in this case I can accept that that the internals of piano-playing open a window into understanding what consciousness is. As can other acts performed most successfully without the intrusion of awareness.
After a few false starts I am up and running with a copy of FineReader Pro 10, which I am using to scan full issues of The Etude Music Magazine and convert them to text. FineReader is by far the best OCR software I have yet used, though my experience is relatively limited. Until now I had mostly used the built-in OCR funcitonality of Windows Scanning software, a program of limited functionality which nevertheless fit the bill for my initial plan: to scan an article or two a week and convert them to text. The more I did this, though, the more interesting it became to me, and I realized that if I am going to do this at all I might as well pull out the stops and do it the best I can.
My plan remains essentially the same: to scan and share content related to piano music, pianists, composers, and the general world of music, including commentary and extra links to try and bring this 100+ year old content up to date. I maintain an abiding interest in the more ephemeral portions of content from these magazines, including the various departments of short items which I group under the "World of Music." I do not expect to make complete issues of The Etude available at this time but nothing should stop me from doing so, and I have changed my mind about this project several times already. I do not expect to make the section of sheet music available at this time. The reason for this is that I simply do not find that material to be very interesting, and I shall save myself the time of scanning it.
This is a personal endeavor I have desired to do for years now, as my large collection of Etude Magazines has moldered away on my shelves. This week I took an additional measure of buying plastic polybags for storage of the magazines, because I find that the more I handle some of these magazines the more rapidly they fall to shreds, and falling-out pages and such make shelving in my available space hazardous to the integrity of the magazines.
