I work in contemporary literature, so almost everything I study is under copyright. Many things I study are available in attenuated digital formats like google books, or kindle editions, but those sorts of formats are not available for doing even a simple text manipulation or visualization, like, say slamming it into Wordle. Other that pushing for available full-access digital editions, what tools are there out there for those times when you find yourself confronted with something that is irredeemably paper?
When your texts aren't digital (yet)
(5 posts) (5 voices)-
Replying to @PhDeviate's post:
Well, it's not a lot of fun, but you can scan the text and then use OCR software to convert the scanned images into machine readable text.
For OCR I have been using ABBYY finereader recently with (mostly) happy results. Alex Gil and I have been working on a scanning project / OCR project in the undergrad classroom about which you can read more (including directions about scanning/OCR'ing) here.
The results text will not be perfect, and you may need to crop out page headers (etc); but it will be more than good enough for Wordle's or other sorts of text analysis.
Of course, there are also legal issues in making any sort of copy and I won't comment on those here (except to say that, in my nonlegal, humble opinion, scanning/OCR'ing a work you OWN for purposes of private text analysis seems like fair use to me).
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
I'm with you on your last paragraph: that seems like fair use to me as well. For the sake of knowing precedents, though (if any), I'd love to know whether any legal actions have been pursued in that regard, and what their outcome might have been.
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
cmedwards
MemberHave you tried Calibre? http://calibre-ebook.com. It's free, open source, and offers a lot of different conversion input/output formats (and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux). I'm certainly no expert, but was able to convert a Google Books epub file to txt without (from my memory, this was a little while ago) any issues. Would be interesting to know what others have experienced...
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
kevin.s.hawkins@gmail.com
MemberYou might look at http://sites.google.com/site/decapodproject/ .
Posted 5 years ago Permalink
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