Google Books

The recent work of Google in text indexing and in large scale scanning is of such magnitude and of such far reaching influence in all parts of education that serious efforts to contextualize this commercial enterprise in academic terms must be done. Dr. Batke's GOOGLE BOOKS: Google Book Search and its Critics would like to start the discussion by reviewing some influential essays on the subject and attempting to remove some obvious misconceptions that inhibit the discussion. and a few quotes from the book: ...dig through Google Books but allow plenty of time for browsing you have just gone into a bookstore with millions of old books. With Google books serendipity is routine not unlike browsing in a used book store (of several million volumes with advanced query functions and text search). ..the lessons on how to find a book in an electronic catalog are not to be applied with Google Book Search... Has no one wondered what it means that Google presents the book opened to a specific page? Page ranking is not there to find specific books; it is there to point to passages in the text (Pages!!). Text is a continuum; a vast index points to pages in the continuum. The pages are a convenient but arbitrary unit. It may be hubris from the perspective of the traditional academics but there it is: the kids from Mountain View want to divide up books into pages and mine pages based on a vast ever growing index.. Are you ready for the Bag of Words? In near future the first encounter with a book my be the open page to a quote not the bibliographical entry. I can already see the convoy of the extremely learned heading for the hills.. Dr. PETER BATKE (Uiversity of North Carolina 1979 Germanic Languages) was one of the early votaries of Humanities Computing. In the 80' he shepherded the Duke Language Toolkit one of many projects at Duke in partnership with IBM to make the personal computer congenial to humanists in many fields. Digitization of text and experimentation with mainframe and personal computer indexing were central concerns. Dr. Batke continued his pioneering work at Johns Hopkins as humanities departments tried to understand the implications of the campus network and New Media. At Princeton from 1994 to 2001 he designed digital solutions for high profile projects in Romance Languages Near Eastern Studies and Materials Science as the network the database and digital media came of age. Most recently Dr. Batke coordinated efforts to create a web presence for the digitized illustrations of the Persian Book of Kings collected at Cambridge University. At present he is working on several concurrent writing and programming projects in the areas of text indexing and data base design.