Horae Apocalypticae poor proofreading before release
I'm very disappointed with this resource. There are misspellings on nearly every page. Just type in the word "Praeterist:" into a search through all 4 volumes, and you will see what I'm talking about. For example, on pg. 566 the subheading should read:
§ 1. Examination and refutation of the german neronic præterist apocalyptic counter-scheme
That's how it appears in the original work that I have in facsimile form. In the Logos version, however, it reads:
§ 1. Examination and refutation of the german negosic præterist apocalyptic countercheme
This 4 volume work should have been proofread more closely before release. I've discovered numerous misspellings while reading just a few of the hits from that single word search! I paid good money for this resource, as well as for the rest of the resources in my library. Now I am left wondering how many of the other resources are imperfect due to poor proofreading.
And by the way, how can a commentary collection be called a collection when it is incomplete? I've noticed bible books missing in WBC, as well as in AYB and other "collections." When I spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for a collection, I expect it to be complete. This really has me aggravated.
Keith
Comments
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Keith Dotzler said:
And by the way, how can a commentary collection be called a collection when it is incomplete? I've noticed bible books missing in WBC, as well as in AYB and other "collections." When I spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for a collection, I expect it to be complete. This really has me aggravated.
I don't have the resource to see how bad the proof-reading is but every now and then a resource comes out that is really bad. Did you report it through the typo mechanism?
The term "collection" is used long before the commentary series is complete. Although there is a lag between publication in print and Logos publication, the normal reason for the collection to be incomplete is that the volume has not been published yet. Do you have some specific examples of missing volumes that have been published for at least three years that are not in the collection or prepub?
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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MJ. Smith said:
I don't have the resource to see how bad the proof-reading is but every now and then a resource comes out that is really bad. Did you report it through the typo mechanism?
So I'm supposed to do that for each typo? In a multi-volume work? Shouldn't I be able to expect that what I'm paying for was proofread? I have done scan work in the past for a friend of mine who published a book. After each page was scanned I sat and proofread them with the author's book in my hand. Obviously the same wasn't done with regard to Horae Apocalypticae.
MJ. Smith said:The term "collection" is used long before the commentary series is complete. Although there is a lag between publication in print and Logos publication, the normal reason for the collection to be incomplete is that the volume has not been published yet. Do you have some specific examples of missing volumes that have been published for at least three years that are not in the collection or prepub?
Ok, I understand. I was unaware that some volumes weren't published in print yet.
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Keith - its a crowd sourced thing. You report the ones you see, I report the ones I see, MJ & Denise see and report all the ones they find, and then Logos on a case by case basis compares them to the original work from the publisher and corrects it so that it is in compliance.
They cant make any improvements over the original. So titles like one by moody someone was complaining about last month or so that has copious numbers of typos in the original can only be brought into more compliance with the original, can't be made better.
As I recall, they are triple checked before release... Maybe they had a new person working on that title.L2 lvl4 (...) WORDsearch, all the way through L10,
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Keith Dotzler said:
So I'm supposed to do that for each typo?
You need only report one and include a comment regarding the frequency of similar errors. But by reporting it as a typo you ensure that it gets to the right department and into the reported typos queue.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Keith Dotzler said:MJ. Smith said:
I don't have the resource to see how bad the proof-reading is but every now and then a resource comes out that is really bad. Did you report it through the typo mechanism?
So I'm supposed to do that for each typo? In a multi-volume work?
No, not if it's a resource that is thoroughly rife with typos. In that case, just report one of them and make a comment in the comments field to the effect that there are so many typos in this resource it isn't worth your time to report them all, but that you think a more thorough quality check needs to be done on the resource.
Most works that have been scanned and OCR'ed will have the occasional typo that gets through. I'm not sure the company actually has the resources to have someone carefully proofread every single page of every book they produce from OCR'ed texts. And even if they do, an error like neronic/negosic might not be caught because a low-wage proofreader might not even know what præterist means, let alone neronic, and he might expect to find words in theological language that he is unfamiliar with, so he might not question negosic. To have to look up every single unfamiliar word while proofreading would take an inordinate amount of time (I know it does; I do that when I'm editing friends' books; nobody could ever pay me enough to compensate me for that time). Faithlife (Logos) does not have the interest in working towards 100% perfection, so in their view it's not worth paying for that kind of proofreading talent and time.
They are aware that a certain small percentage of typos will sneak through, and they do count on crowdsourcing to report them and fix them. But if a case comes along of a book that clearly has more than just a few errors, they will pull it back for a more thorough internal review and try to fix up as many of them as they can.
Somewhere Bob Pritchett once pointed out that when you're doing OCR, even 99.9% accuracy will mean there will be a couple of typos on every page. Most OCR'ed works in Logos have fewer than that, though some have more. So while we would love to have 100% accuracy (and I strive for it in all the books I copyedit), in this day and age where so much in publishing is automated, it is less and less common to find that. It frustrates me as much as it does you.
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Last time I checked, searching for "cod" still turned up a few hits.
EDIT:
Yup see for example:Whether you regard the life of any individual, or the life of the race of men, or the life of animals, or the vegetable life of the world, it is all a fruit, a common fruit of redemption, a benefit of the death of Christ, from all eternity purposed, and so far as Cod is concerned accomplished also. (pp. 295f)
Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality, and the Christian Tradition (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2003), 137.
OR:the Confession also takes the position that, though believers may have the assurance of their salvation divers ways shaken, diminished, and intermitted, “yet they are never utterly destitute of that seed of Cod …
Louis Berkhof, The Assurance of Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1939), 29.
ORIn respect of suffering, at the altar of sacrifice, the slain animal was the type of Christ, the Lamb of Cod, that beareth away the sin of the world.
Hugh Martin, The Atonement: In Its Relations to the Covenant, the Priesthood, the Intercession of Our Lord (Edinburgh: James Gemmell, 1882), 118.
OR
L2 lvl4 (...) WORDsearch, all the way through L10,
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abondservant said:
As I recall, they are triple checked before release... Maybe they had a new person working on that title.
I doubt they triple proofread every page. I think they might do some spot checking, but that's about it. Usually they don't even do a spellcheck on the entire contents, as I've found glaring typos that weren't even real words. They claim that doing a spellcheck is mostly pointless because there are so many things in their books that are not (and should not be) in spelling dictionaries, that red flags would go up all over the place and it would take more time to look through them all for the real typos than it's worth.
The one thing I've heard about multiple checking is for old books where the original print is so hard to OCR accurately that they have to key in the text from scratch. In that case they have two different people key it in (they hire low-wage people from India or somewhere, I believe) and then they use software to compare the input of the two typists. Wherever it differs they visually check to see which was correct. The theory is that a typo is very unlikely to be made in exactly the same way by two different people. So they increase their accuracy to close to 99.9% that way. I'm not sure that the fully automated OCR scans are quite as rigorously checked, though.
And then of course for most books published more recently they get the text files directly from the publisher, so they don't have to OCR them or re-key them. But then they are stuck with the typos that were in the original, which, in this day and age where publishers don't hire copyeditors anymore, can sometimes be atrocious.
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abondservant said:
Last time I checked, searching for "cod" still turned up a few hits.
Heh heh, yup every time I find an obvious OCR typo, I go searching through my entire Library for it and report the other instances. The most recent set of them I found was tlie (for the) and related words (tliey for they, tlieir for their, etc.). Found a few dozen that way. It gets tedious reporting them all. I do wish Faithlife had an employee whose sole job was to look through all the typo reports that come in for patterns that are obvious OCR errors like the above (i.e., non-words that could not possibly mean anything else and have an obvious fix) and then search the entire opus of Logos resources for other occurrences of the same error, saving us all the trouble of stumbling upon them and reporting them.
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There are bunches of cod all throughout. I have reported many in the past, and I always ask "and please search the rest of logos catalog of books for this same error as its quite prevalent".
Yet here we are two years later
I just make sure to proof read what I quote.L2 lvl4 (...) WORDsearch, all the way through L10,
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Words like Cod, Jesusalem, etc. should all be taken care of in a day. It can't be that difficult!
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Lee said:
Words like Cod, Jesusalem, etc. should all be taken care of in a day. It can't be that difficult!
I'm sure it's not that hard, but they'd probably rather spend one day editing a few files and fixing all the reported typos in them and saving/testing/uploading those few files than spend one day opening hundreds of files and fixing the same error across all of them, saving the files and running whatever tests they have to run on all of them to make sure none of the tagging got broken in the editing, and uploading them all back to the server. The latter is just much less efficient.
But I've always maintained they should have a list of words they test every single resource file for whenever they create new resources, and old resources should be tested against the list whenever they get around to opening them up for typo updates. Words like Cod, Jesusalem, chruch, diferent, tlie, tliough, and other habitual offenders should be on the list.
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Rosie Perera said:
Heh heh, yup every time I find an obvious OCR typo, I go searching through my entire Library for it and report the other instances. The most recent set of them I found was tlie (for the) and related words (tliey for they, tlieir for their, etc.). Found a few dozen that way. It gets tedious reporting them all. I do wish Faithlife had an employee whose sole job was to look through all the typo reports that come in for patterns that are obvious OCR errors like the above (i.e., non-words that could not possibly mean anything else and have an obvious fix) and then search the entire opus of Logos resources for other occurrences of the same error, saving us all the trouble of stumbling upon them and reporting them.
Rosie, do you know how fast these get fixed? Do you go back and check after a resource is updated to see if something you reported was fixed?
I report typos as I come across them, but sometimes I wonder if it really accomplishes anything or not (in light of the bigger problems with the sort of books I read).
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Sean said:
Rosie, do you know how fast these get fixed? Do you go back and check after a resource is updated to see if something you reported was fixed?
I have created a Highlighting style which I apply to any typo after I report it. That helps me remember that I've reported it already so I don't have to again. And it also helps me go back to check if typos I've reported have been fixed.
I've been able to delete a small number of my reported typo highlights over the years, as they've been fixed. I currently still have 850. Can't say I've had the time to go through them recently looking to see if more have been fixed. But can say I am very glad for the new feature in Logos 6 that lets me search for them much more efficiently than the old wildcard method:
I wish they would post a list of resources they've done typo fixes in somewhere, so we could check against that. I know they do try to make their way through the backlog systematically. But with so many tens of thousands of resources in their catalog, and not wanting to force people to do massive downloads too frequently, it is necessarily going to take a LONG time for them to get to everything.
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