3.1227 preparing the OED (36)
Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca)
Tue, 27 Mar 90 20:37:20 EST
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 1227. Tuesday, 27 Mar 1990.
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 90 03:03:30 EST
From: "Michael S. Hart" <HART@UIUCVMD>
Subject: Re: 3.1215 scanning and e-texts (204)
re: the cost of preparing the OED in machine readable form.
One MUST be aware that this project was carried out my hand,
i.e. every word and abbr. was typed in by hand, proofreaders
probably went over the entire work more than several times &
who knows if spell-checkers were used to catch the blatanter
(@) errors. The cost to doing that project today would be a
fraction of what it was then (I believe it originated in '75
several years after we started a similar project which had a
somewhat informal support, non-financial, at the university)
Modern scanners, boast of capabilities which would make this
job even another few orders of magnitude less expesive, that
is, if you believe what you read.
Thank you for your interest,
Michael S. Hart, Director, Project Gutenberg
National Clearinghouse for Machine Readable Texts
BITNET: HART@UIUCVMD INTERNET: HART@VMD.CSO.UIUC.EDU
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