Month: August 2016

Categories
Scholarly tech

Scholarly Tech: OCR and Smartphones

Commercial Camera Company Photostat ad from the July 1, 1920 issue of American Machinist.
Commercial Camera Company Photostat ad from the July 1, 1920 issue of American Machinist.

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a little considered research tool that can prove both handy and valuable for students and scholars. This is especially so if you combine its abilities with the ubiquitous smartphone.

It wasn’t that long ago that scholars commonly resorted to taking index card notes in pencil when examining books that could not be checked out of a library or material found in an government archive. Some libraries had Photostat machines, which enabled one to “photocopy” material, until they were usurped by cheaper and more convenient electrostatic copiers from Xerox.

If you go to a special collections room at a college or university library today, the most common device researchers seem to use to copy material is the cameras in their smartphones and tablets. Compared to arranging to have Xerox copies made (the amount of which might be limited by library policy), the process is much simpler, more convenient, and certainly cheaper. (It is also environmentally more sustainable.) As such, researchers like me are able to gather greater amounts of material much more quickly.

This brings up the issue of what to do with all this new material? One way to handle this bounty is to use OCR software. Scaled-down OCR programs are usually included when you buy a multifunction printer-scanner. The quality of these programs is variable; so, if you want to do OCR on the cheap, I recommend you look for a scanner that bundles software from ABBYY. ABBYY seems to be the gold standard for OCR, having been used in scanning books from major libraries for Google Books. However, if you want to do it right, consider buying ABBY Fine Reader Professional 12 (Windows), which I use to handle all sorts of text documents, including those captured with my smartphone. (There are also corporate and Mac versions.) The latest version is especially valuable, as it is optimized to handle smartphone images. Once ABBYY has processed the images, it can then spit out a document in several formats, including Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat (pdf), from which you can then copy and paste the text you want.

Adobe Acrobat Pro DC (and other pdf programs) can also perform good quality OCR on photocopied material, though the initial conversion is to the Acrobat format; from there, they can further convert it to MS Word.

Categories
Bibliographic management Research tools

Research Sources: WorldCat

Snow White and the Seven DwarfsWorldCat is not the sexiest research tool out there, focusing as it does on bibliographic information concerning books, DVDs, CDs and articles. But it can also be very useful in a number of small but handy ways.

WorldCat is the public face of the Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), which began life in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center. It eventually replaced the National Union Catalog, a mammoth ongoing publishing project which compiled and printed the 3” x 5” catalog cards prepared by the Library of Congress and others in libraries around the United States.

It remains the place to find out where you can locate a particular item in over 10,000 libraries around the world. For instance, I often use it to see which local library has a particular book. Libraries do the same when they are trying to borrow something for a patron through interlibrary loan. It is also a source for cataloging information that institutions use to create entries in their own library catalogs.

Google Scholar and Google Books have, in a number of ways, superseded WorldCat as a way to identify useful sources of printed information. Still, it does provide a rather handy way to compile bibliographies, though its abilities in this regard are greatly enhanced by using a bibliographic management program like Zotero.Worldcat MLA Citation for Capital

However, if all you need is a bibliographic citation for a term paper, it can do the job quickly with a reasonable degree of accuracy. See, for instance, the MLA citation created a 1967 edition of  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Capital above.

Like other sites which automatically generate citations, you have to realize that they are not always infallible. An example is the following entry, in MLA style, for the 2009 DVD of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:

Hand, David, Ted Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Rickard, Earl Hurd, Maris M. De, Dorothy A. Blank, Webb Smith, Walt Disney, Adriana Caselotti, Roy Atwell, Eddie Collins, Pinto Colvig, Billy Gilbert, Otis Harlan, Verne L. La, Scotty Mattraw, Harry Stockwell, Frank Churchill, Leigh Harline, Paul J. Smith, Wilhelm Grimm, and Jacob Grimm. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2009.

Listing 24 people as the film’s authors is somewhat absurd and unwieldy. As a film’s director is usually considered the film’s author, a better citation would be:

Hand, David. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2009.

Last update: December 26. 2016

 

Categories
Academic writing Fiction and nonfiction writing Opening statements Structure Term papers

Structure: Once upon a time….

The end of Jean Cocteau's introduction to his film version of Beauty and the Beast.
The end of Jean Cocteau’s introduction to his film version of Beauty and the Beast.

Writers of nonfiction, including the academic variety, can often learn useful lessons from the more “artful” storytelling world of novelists, playwrights and filmmakers. The phrase “Once upon a time…,” despite or perhaps because of age (it’s apparently been in use since 1380), still evokes a sense of wonder. It’s a sense that has been exploited in numerous ways over the years, including George Lucas’ “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” in Star Wars to the title of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

The introduction to the first Star Wars movie.
The introduction to the first Star Wars movie.

Sometimes opening words can take on a life all their own. Think of the first paragraph of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” or “Rosebud,” the first word spoken in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. While Tolstoy’s sentence sets the tone for his novel, the dying word of Charles Foster Kane sets up a mystery (a question if you will) which the film’s story attempts to unravel.

Students are taught to write introductory paragraphs that clearly state what you are going to write about and how you are going to go about it. Unless you have been assigned to do one of those five-paragraph essays, your opening statement does not have to be your opening paragraph—it might even be several paragraphs long.

For instance, you could start off by telling an anecdote whose relevance to your topic is not initially evident. It could set up a mystery or question much like Welles did with “Rosebud.” One might also begin with an evocative quotation, such as “Once upon a time….” to start a book review of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, or Tolstoy’s “Happy families” to introduce your essay on the dynamics of families coping with schizophrenia.

While the use of anecdotes and/or quotations to start off your book or essay might seem a bit of a cliché, they can be useful literary devices to get you going. After all, it’s much more interesting than starting a term paper for your American Literature class with something as cut and dry as, “John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California.”