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.
