Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
I don't use the dictionary much, but I make a lot of annotations. Mainly to mark errors in books so I can fix them. All those older books that have been scanned and not proofread.
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All the scanning errors are sometimes quite distracting while reading those older scanned books.
I wonder if anyone has ever actually tried the paper book digitizing technique that Vernor Vinge described in the SF book "Rainbows End"? What he proposed (not seriously, I'm sure) was using a variant of the shotgun genome sequencing technique like this:
Shotgun genome sequencing:
- create many copies of the DNA
- break it into many random fragments
- sequence each fragment
- use a powerful computer to string the many fragment sequences together into a coherent whole using the overlaps
- use multiple redundancy to eliminate gaps and errors
Shotgun book digitizing (as described by Vernor Vinge):
- take every available paper copy of a book and run them through a shredder
- blow the shredded paper fragments down a wind tunnel lined with cameras that capture the images of the fragments, each with a few words or phrases on it
- use a powerful computer to string the many fragments together etc. etc.
The older viewpoint character in Rainbows End was of course horrified at the wanton destruction of entire paper libraries, but the idea has a certain fascination.
