Printing differences and material issues in Google Books

I am looking forward to presenting my Digital Parisian Stage corpus and the exciting results I’ve gotten from it so far at the American Association for Corpus Linguistics at Iowa State in September. In the meantime I’m continuing to process texts, working towards a one percent sample from the Napoleonic period (Volume 1 of the Wicks catalog).

One of the plays in my sample is les M?urs du jour, ou l’?cole des femmes, a comedy by Collin-Harleville (also known as Jean-Fran?ois Collin d’Harleville). I ran the initial OCR on a PDF scanned for the Google Books project. For reasons that will become clear, I will refer to it by its Google Books ID, VyBaAAAAcAAJ. When I went to clean up the OCR text, I discovered that it was missing pages 2-6. I emailed the Google Books team about this, and got the following response:

google-books-material-issue

I’m guessing “a material issue” means that those pages were missing from the original paper copy, but I didn’t even bother emailing until the other day, since I found another copy in the Google Books database, with the ID kVwxUp_LPIoC.

Comparing the OCR text of VyBaAAAAcAAJ with the PDF of kVwxUp_LPIoC, I discovered some differences in spelling. For example, throughout the text, words that end in the old fashioned spelling -ois or -oit in VyBaAAAAcAAJ are spelled with the more modern -ais in kVwxUp_LPIoC. There is also a difference in the way “Madame” is abbreviated (“Mad.” vs. “M.me“) and in which accented letters preserve their accents when set in small caps, and differences in pagination. Here is the entirety of Act III, Scene X in each copy:

VyBaAAAAcAAJ

Act III, Scene X in copy VyBaAAAAcAAJ

Act III, Scene X in kVwxUp_LPIoC

Act III, Scene X in copy kVwxUp_LPIoC

My first impulse was to look at the front matter and see if the two copies were identified as different editions or different printings. Unfortunately, they were almost identical, with the most notable differences being that VyBaAAAAcAAJ has an ? ligature in the title, while kVwxUp_LPIoC is signed by the playwright and marked as being a personal gift from him to an unspecified recipient. Both copies give the exact same dates: the play was first performed on the 7th of Thermidor in year VIII and published in the same year (1800).

The Google Books metadata indicate that kVwxUp_LPIoC was digitized from the Lyon Public Library, while VyBaAAAAcAAJ came from the Public Library of the Netherlands. The other copies I have found in the Google Books database, OyL1oo2CqNIC from the National Library of Naples and dPRIAAAAcAAJ from Ghent University, appear to be the same printing as kVwxUp_LPIoC, as does the copy from the National Library of France.

Since the -ais and M.me spellings are closer to the forms used in France today, we might expect that kVwxUp_LPIoC and its cousins are from a newer printing. But in Act II, Scene XI I came across a difference that concerns negation, the variable that I have been studying for many years. The decadent Parisians Monsieur Basset and Madame de Verdie question whether marriage should be eternal. Our hero Formont replies that he has no reason not to remain with his wife forever. In VyBaAAAAcAAJ he says, “je n’ai pas de raisons,” while in kVwxUp_LPIoC he says “je n’ai point de raisons.”

Act III, Scene XI (page 75) in VyBaAAAAcAAJ

Act III, Scene XI (page 75) in VyBaAAAAcAAJ

Act III, Scene XI (page 78) in kVwxUp_LPIoC

Act III, Scene XI (page 78) in kVwxUp_LPIoC

In my dissertation study I found that the relative use of ne ? point had already peaked by the nineteenth century, and was being overtaken by ne ? pas. If this play fits the pattern, the use of the more conservative pattern in kVwxUp_LPIoC goes against the more innovative -ais and M.me spellings.

I am not an expert in French Revolutionary printing (if anyone knows a good reference or contact, please let me know!). My best guess is that kVwxUp_LPIoC is from a limited early run, some copies of which were given to the playwright to give away, while VyBaAAAAcAAJ and the other -ais/M.me/ne ? point copies are from a larger, slightly later, printing.

In any case, it is clear that I should pick one copy and make it consistent with that. Since VyBaAAAAcAAJ is incomplete, I will try dPRIAAAAcAAJ. I will try to double-check all the spellings and wordings, but at the very least I will check all of the examples of negation against dPRIAAAAcAAJ as I annotate them.

Introducing Selected Birthdays

If you have an Android phone like me, you probably use Google Calendar. I like the way it integrates with my contacts so that I can schedule events with people. I like the idea of it integrating with my Google+ contacts to automatically create a calendar of birthdays that I don’t want to miss. There’s a glitch in that, but I’ve created a new app to get around it, called Selected Birthdays.

The glitch is that the builtin Birthdays calendar has three options: show your Google Contacts, show your contacts and the people in your Google+ circles, or nothing. I have a number of contacts who are attractive and successful people, but I’m sorry to say I have no interest in knowing when their birthdays are. Natasha Lomas has even stronger feelings.

Google doesn’t let you change the builtin Birthdays calendar, but it does let you create a new calendar and fill it with the birthdays that interest you. My new web app, Selected Birthdays, automates that process. It goes through your contacts, finds the ones who have shared their birthdays with you, and gives you a checklist. You decide whose birthdays to include, and Select Birthdays will create a new calendar with those birthdays. It’ll also give you the option of hiding Google’s built-in birthday calendar.

I wrote the Selected Birthdays app in Javascript with the Google+ and Google Calendar APIs. Ian Jones was a big help in recommending the moment.js library, which I used to manipulate dates. Bootflat helped me add a bit of visual style.

For the app to work you’ll have to authorize it to read your contacts and write your calendars. For your privacy, the app communicates directly between your browser and Google’s server; once you download it there is no further contact with my server. There is no way for me to see or edit your contacts or calendars. You can verify that in the source code.

Please let me know if you have any comments, questions or suggestions. I have also made the code available on GitHub for free under the Apache License, if you want to build on it. A number of people have said they wish they had an app like this for Facebook. If enough of you repeat that, I’ll look into it!