Proofing the Journal of Discourses

[Ben Crowder]

Everyone,

I'm getting together a group of volunteers to proof the Journal of Discourses (which I released in EPUB/Kindle form a while ago, but the original Wikisource text was riddled with typos and it needs a thorough proofcheck against the page images).

http://bencrowder.net/blog/2011/11/proofing-the-journal-of-discourses

If you're interested in helping out, let me know. :)

Thanks!

Ben

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Ben Crowder <ben.c...@gmail.com>
http://bencrowder.net

[Stephen Cranney]

That's interesting, I've made it through 1 1/2 volumes, and haven't noticed anything significant. Maybe I subconsciously edit the text. 

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[Kent Larsen]

Ben,

JoD is already available here:

http://scriptures.byu.edu/

and on Deseret Book's GospelLink, IIRC.

The scriptures.byu.edu version is free and very easy to access.

On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 4:45 PM, Ben Crowder <ben.c...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Ben Crowder]

That's what I thought at first, too, but when I started looking through it more carefully, I found several just in the first few pages. (And the missing paragraph breaks and missing italics wouldn't be detectable anyway.)

Ben

[Ben Crowder]

Cool, thanks for the heads up.

Ben

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[Kent Larsen]

FWIW, I suppose one way to identify and correct errors is to compare the text from wikitext with the text from scriptures.byu.edu.

I assume scriptures.byu.edu could also have errors in it also. But I'll bet that BYU's HBLL paid students to correct the OCR job at some point (I know I'm making assumptions on that, but it seems like the way they would approach this).

In any case, even if they are both just two different OCR jobs without correction, comparing the two will catch errors that other methods (including proofreading) might miss.

[Ben Crowder]

Good idea. Generally speaking, the HBLL students don't correct the OCR on their digital projects (I work at the HBLL in the same division as their supervisor), and the OCR on BYU's Journal of Discourses files is pretty bad, so I'm guessing Richard Galbraith (the professor who does scriptures.byu.edu) had his interns clean the text up, or they re-OCRed the images with better software (and then cleaned it up). Either way, it'll be good to diff the two and see what we get.

Ben

[Kent Larsen]

Wow, Ben. I didn't realize that you work there. Cool.

[Ben Crowder]

Yep, I'm the senior web designer there. It's a good place for bookish folk. :)

Ben