Slashdot Mirror
Google Books As "Train Wreck" For Scholars
Following up on our earlier discussion, here's more detail on Geoffrey Nunberg's argument that Google Books could prove detrimental to academics and other scholars. Recently Nunberg gave a talk at a conference claiming that the metadata in Google Books is riddled with errors and is classified in a scheme unfit for scholarly use. This blog post was fleshed out somewhat a few days later in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Quoting from the latter: "Start with publication dates. To take Google's word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler's Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, [and] Stephen King's Christine... A search on 'internet' in books written before 1950 and turns up 527 hits. ... [Google blames some errors on the originating libraries.] ...the libraries can't be responsible for books mislabeled as Health and Fitness and Antiques and Collectibles, for the simple reason that those categories are drawn from the Book Industry Standards and Communications codes, which are used by the publishers to tell booksellers where to put books on the shelves. ... In short, Google has taken a group of the world's great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore." The head of metadata for Google Books, Jon Orwant, has responded in detail to Numberg's complaints in a comment on the original blog post — and says his team has already fixed the errors that Nunberg so helpfully pointed out.
...when you have Search? Pick your own keywords.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
So, the argument is that the new system is bad because it may have errors or bad data?
Were card catalogs immune to this? It's a database. It's only as good as what you put into it. A bad database is not useful. It just means someone needs to do it better. Honestly, if anything this seems like an argument that the database shouldn't be proprietary. It should be open to everyone so that someone can always make a better version of the metadata with the same base data.
"It's a piece of shit" shouldn't be the same argument as "nobody should even try it". The Wright brothers didn't exactly start out with a 747 or an F-35.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
They haven't finished counting Stephen King's books yet.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
As someone who majored in English Literature in college, I can tell you that academics love getting their panties in a bunch over what is Scholarly Publication and what is not. Some teachers will actually have special assignments that have to be written entirely using Scholarly sources, or in response to a Scholarly article.
Before the advent of the internet, I can see how it might have been useful to have an in-group comprised of people who had some sort of qualifications to write about something, but it seems antiquated in light of the ease with which we can independently verify claims.
Usually, if someone's going to write something that's actually useful, they'll write an actual book. Soon thereafter, a bunch of "Scholars" will come along and write a bunch of journal articles and tell us all about how the useful work was one of three things: misogynistic, code for a religious statement, or arcane, carefully-hidden innuendo.
Sorry if I sound bitter, but I spent a lot of time reading this crap, and very little of it was as insightful or interesting as even my classmates' comments.
Google has scanned many volumes of the Laws of Indiana, which go back to 1816. These are the session laws of the Indiana General Assembly and have never been copyrighted. However, Google has arbitrarily decided not to make most post-1922 volumes it has digitized, and even some pre-1922 volumes (e.g. 1877, 1893, 1895, 1909, 1917 and 1918), available, using the claim of copyright.
Google has done all the decision-making here. Anyone who might object to the classification of one of these volumes as copyrighted and thus available in "snippet-view only" presumably would have the burden of proving the contrary. (And where would you even start? Who would you contact? I have seen nothing on this.)
Once (or if) the settlement is approved early this fall, Google's "rights" attach to these volumes. If I understand correctly, at that point any individual who wishes to access one of these volumes of Indiana's session laws not already in "full view" will have to pay for it, and for the money will obtain only individual rights, NOT the right to make it freely available to others.
Broader implications: Finally, this analysis has been limited to volumes of Indiana session laws, but surely similar situations exist more broadly.
For more on this, see this Aug. 2, 2009 Indiana Law Blog entry: http://indianalawblog.com/archives/2009/08/courts_my_probl.html
And this is no exception. Before google books you had access to books from various libraries, books you owned, books you could loan from friends (*shock* *gasp* copyright infringement), books you could buy and books from non-google online sources. Now you have access to all of those and additionally google books. Even if google books is 99% "piece of shit" (which in my experience is simply not true, but nevertheless) you still have the 1% potentially useful material available that wasn't available before, so you win.
like shelving 'Life of an Iceberg' under biographies, but by and large they strive to be and are correct. If they mess up, some other library will fix the error. Libraries' cataloging data is usually centralized by OCLC so that the data is uniform throughput the country as other libraries pull from this central source for their own catalogs. Libraries also use a recognized and standardized subject scheme with a controlled vocabulary, not just a bunch of meta tags. Cataloging librarians are a rare and little-recognized breed of people who spend their entire professional lives trying to make it easier to gain access to material. The result is an organized body of knowledge--not just a heap of books on the floor in no particular order, like the Internet--and Google. For Google to blame libraries for their troubles is like blaming the Machinist Mates on the Titanic for crashing the ship into an iceberg. There, full circle. How did that happen?
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
With all the class act talent that Google hires right out of college, why can't Google create its own Public Library on the Internet? Chrome could be the entry way to any book that is in the Public Domain, or by the Authors written permission. Turning the page of a book could be as simple as the [Back], or [Next] button. The "Card Catalog" would be a No-Brainer. No Library goes through these many hops. There's even translation to other languages, Brail, and Audio; from my viewpoint, this SHOULD be the challenge, not what word category is or isn't. If it's a case of "buy the book", then to buy 10 copies of "Gone with the Wind", and ONLY allow up to 10 readers to ONLY read "Gone with the Wind". Google could even have a "Google Online Library Card"; this is were the company hums "Ka-Ching".
The inline replies are written with a smug sense of self-entitlement as though he and other "scholars" are the only legitimate users of Google Books. It's NOT about you - you are not going to create enough adsense hits to make this whole thing worthwhile (or turn a profit).
... is that academics can't rely on Google Books to make their bibliographies, because the publication date and authorship information, which are used in all citation styles (MLA, Harvard, etc.) are incorrect on Google Books for an apparently large amount of books. Categories aren't used in citations, they're used by searchers.
Jon Orwant of Google said that 1899 was a placeholder year for unknown publication dates, as provided by some of their metadata providers... which leads me to ask if they sanitise their data or do any research into publication dates themselves!
They forgot to count the Wheel of Time.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
This is much like Google itself.
Google's brilliance, and woe, is its sloppy imprecision.
You type in a query. It returns a bunch of stuff. Quite a lot of it is irrelevant and as perceived as not meeting the requirements of the search, but you don't mind because all you care about is that it finds what you want, not that it finds other stuff. Unfortunately, Google is so good that it tricks you into believing that it always finds everything that matches your query. But, of course, there's no way to find out what it _missed_.
I've personally noticed and been puzzled by the publication dates. I'd noticed it particularly with periodicals. What seems to be the case here is that Google is very prone to give the date that a journal began publication as the publication date of every article that has ever appeared in that journal.
Wikipedia editors are well aware of the dangers of using Google hit counts as data. It's amusing to see that there are 1,930,000 hits on "Ghandi" compared to 22,900,000 for "Gandhi" and conclude that Gandhi's name is misspelled 10% of the time... or to notice, as I have, that that percentage is increasing and project the year in which "Ghandi" must inevitably become the accepted spelling... but it is, as they say, "for amusement purposes only."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Yes, having all of the world's literature available for instant full text search sounds
disastrous for scholars.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Tangential, but "card catalogs." Ha! I once had a compelling need to look up an article in the Occasional Papers of the Bingham Oceanographic Collection. So I went to the card catalog.
It wasn't under O. It wasn't under P. It wasn't under B. It wasn't under C.
It was under N.
Why? Because, naturally, as of course everybody knows, the Bingham Oceanographic Collection is part of the Peabody Museum. Which is part of Yale. Which (drum roll...)... ...is in New Haven.
The great thing here is that you can't even say there was an error in the card catalog, unless filing something under a heading that is perfectly correct, but under which nobody would dream of looking for it, is considered an error.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
They pushed the copyright law to over hundred years (just to make sure they will make money of writers even after they are dead), now comes our big brother Google to the ring to resurrect all the OUT OF COPYRIGHT books -- meaning those dead books that publishers no longer exclusively distribute. What an offense against the poor publishers. Google is creating a real e-Library of enormous proportions of virtually free books, what a threat. I bet I am not alone who wants to see the Newton's books on physics e-published again and searchable.
As an aspiring academic half way through a philosophy Ph. D., I find Nunberg's argument pretty absurd. Google books is a godsend for academics, and would be much more so if there was full access to their entire catalog rather than "limited previews" for most books. I have used Google books countless times to quickly check out whether a book is relevant to my research, or to get the gist of an author's argument without having to trudge down to the library. I know many others who do this as well. In all this time I've never even looked at Google's metadata. No decent academic would rely on such information, as there are far more reliable methods: such as actually checking what's written in the book, which yes, Google scans in.
This could be the stupidest and most disingenuous argument I've encountered all year. I guess I'll never know since the metadata is not at my finger tips. This might be a good argument for getting the metadata right. It isn't a good argument for tossing the virtual books out with the bathwater.
So no I won't get off your lawn. We're better off without scholars who'd rather hoard information. Begone!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Which is incredibly helpful for anybody interested in printed materials before 1966...
I don't read him as saying, "any book that can be found in the holdings of a major research library is only of interest to scholars." at all. Rather, I read him as sayin that the systems that libraries use to organize books be they Dewey Decimal, Library of Congress, or some other system were created to help organize books for users to use them. The BISAC classifications were developed to help companies sell books. Why use that rather than what the libraries -- the source of these books -- uses?
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
You're fighting the wrong battle here. It's easy to find any number of legitimately nasty things about 'Scholars' and 'Academics' and elitism in general. But arguing for proper classification in Google Books is not one of them.
For several years I was an avid amateur of Information Retrieval. Classification (and other useful organisational models) of information into related collections is essential when you don't know what keywords you're looking for. This is especially important with historical works, where the use of 21st Century names, terms and other common keywords is next to useless.
Google search is useful when you know what you're searching for. But knowing what to look for in Google Books is an entirely different matter. Categorisation matters here.
By using a classification system that is designed for book sellers, Google's chosen a very poor set of criteria. Not only will most of the titles be poorly characterised (and thus harder to find), the effort required to find them increases with their rarity or uniqueness. These aren't always a measure of importance or interest, but often enough, they are.
Asking Google to consider a proven, effective and well-understood categorisation system is not being snooty; it's an effort to suggest - as we geeks often do - that there might actually be a correct way to perform this task.
Sometimes what looks like 'arrogance' is actually the state of being right about something when no one else will listen.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Why did they bother?
Why did you bother to comment on it? If you don't like it - don't use it.
You are clearly ignorant of the key problem with the Google books settlement (as it currently stands), which is that Google and only Google will be given the right to reproduce orphaned works. I assume the morons tagging this "caveat emptor" are also ignorant of this.
So your glib remark should more correctly read, "if you don't like it, never have access to millions of pages of orphaned copyright works again because Google has an exclusive licence to reproduce them electronically". Which doesn't quite work as well, really, does it?
Read Pynchon.
There is no reason for you to post this comment here when you could have put together a properly formed and documented essay in a couple of months. There is was no reason for Newton to come up with his theory of gravity when in a few centuries Einstein would come up with a more complete theory.
This is a long term project for humanity. We damn well better start now rather than waiting to do it right. Badly data can be cross compared and corrected. Data which has not been digitized at all is completely useless (Towards the purpose of having digitized data). In the time it took you to complain about it you could have pulled up a few scans, and done some good old fashioned legwork in the form of copying it out in ASCII and redrawing the illustrations like clerks of old.
As long as the books themselves are perfectly fine (which they seem to be),
Well, some are really good and well scanned, but others are a mess. From some organizations that do the scanning, you get missing pages and mangled pages. You get pages where the person doing the scanning sometimes put their hand between the page and the glass, so you can read the rings on their fingers but not the text on the page. (Books scanned at NY Public Library for example.) If ever there is a fold-out, you get at max half of it.
The Google Books organization doesn't seem to want to know, there is a mechanism for reporting single page defects but when 50 defects occur in a book it gets hard to work through them all using the button-clicks: I tried it for two books and also sent a message to Google Books, there was an automated reply and no action after several months.
So much for 'As long as the books themselves are perfectly fine ....', I'm afraid.
-wb-
I hate to be so cynical, but there was a huge uptick in negative articles on Slashdot about Google as soon as Microsoft started their anti-Google PR effort in DC. Now I see at least one anti-Google article on Slashdot every day. Is Slashdot falling for an extensive trolling effort from MS?
More info available from previous Slashdot article...