Re: Benchmark transcription file

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Bruce,

At 11:00 11/08/01 -0400, Bruce Grant wrote:
> It seems to me that it would be nice to have a sort of "benchmark 
> transcription"
> of the VMS extracted from the EVA transcription which would have these
> characteristics: </snip>

Is my mind really that easy to read? :-)

> Even though such a file would contain less information than the EVA, it 
> would be
> useful for the  various statistical tests that people do, making these these
> tests directly comparable and repeatable, and allowing the group to 
> accumulate a
> set of consistent and useable statistics over time.

Each transcription system has its merits and demerits, and as we have yet 
to agree on decoding a single letter in any of them, we should be careful 
not to close doors if we can help it. :-/

Also: until we have high-quality digitised images of the VMS that (for 
example) we can run through enhancement filters, a significant proportion 
of quill-strokes are indistinct enough that definitive categorisation of 
them is unlikely. It may additionally turn out to be true that (if the VMS 
were copied by someone who didn't understand it) this may always remain 
beyond our reach. :-/

However, in the context of opening out the statistical analyses to a wider 
audience, locking to a single transcription text (while also building 
filters/maps to transform it into other spaces) seems like a good idea, at 
least for a while.

Perhaps a later iteration could merge the various interleaved lines into a 
single line, and assign a fuzzy probability to each possible reading? Just 
an idea. :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....