When vacation ended, they were kind enough to let me have it (after much whining) because I wanted to post interesting entries online.  But was it still in copyright?

Here’s the citation:

Goldin, Hyman E., Frank O’Leary, and Morris Lipsius, eds. Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo, New York: Twayne, 1950.

When I got the book home I looked up Twayne (they’re now owned by Gale/Cengage), and checked their online catalog.  It wasn’t in there, but that only means it’s out of print, not out of copyright.

Enter yesterday’s release of U.S. copyright renewals by the Google Books team. Since the dictionary was published between 1923 and 1963, the absence of its appearance in the renewals data strongly suggests that it’s public domain.  Not so strongly that I’d just grab the content and re-print it, but enough that I feel comfortable posting some excerpts here now and then.

This time, we’ll start with the “Advisory Board”:

1. Bad Bill - arrested on a variety of criminal pursuits
2. Big Department - extortionist, police impersonator, jewel thief among the NYC elite
3. Bubbles - robber, forger and burglar
4. Butch - bank robber, strike breaker, election fraud boss, car thief, pinball and slot-machine operator
5. Chink - purse-snatcher, safe-robber and armed holdup man
6. Chop Chop - strong-arm terrorist [sic], burglar and robbre
7. Dippo - pickpocket from age 14 to 39
8. Duke - pickpock, con man, carnival thief
9. Hal the Rebel - various
10. Iggy - robber, carnival thief, con man
11. Jo Jo - robber and burglar
12. Red Mack - robber and burglar
13. Slim - counterfeiter and forger
14. Stubs - larcenist, forger and swingler
15. The Colonel - con man ["He requests that no further details be made public"]

• On TeleRead, I discussed some observations about the adoption of e-books by academic (rather than trade) publishers.
• My favorite talk was the agile software development panel, which I discuss on TOC

I’ll be at ALA at the end of June and expect to learn a ton, and hopefully party with some librarians.

Epub?

ePUB?

There are a number of projects I’ve got lined up and they’re all going to follow the famous imperative that good programmers should be lazy. The kind of laziness I discuss in the article (re-use and domain-specific languages) isn’t what Larry Wall meant, but I’ll maintain it’s a solid foundation for digital publishing.

There are a number of talks I’m looking forward to, especially in the areas of deep web reference discovery, ebooks (obviously) and applying the lessons of agile software development to publishing workflows. It should be a good conference.

Drop me a line at liza@threepress.org if you want to meet up.

Uploaded files are run through the validator and any error messages are reported. The error report includes some notes to help decipher the sometimes-cryptic messages (notes are taken from the epubcheck wiki).

epub files are deleted immediately after validation, but take care not to upload any proprietary or sensitive documents. This tool provides no guarantees that any information it receives is secure.

The tool is running epubcheck version 0.9.5.  It is planned that the front-end will track updates of the epubcheck library.

1. threepress search, which is the web application that is running on threepress.org.
2. epub-tools, which is a repository for standalone tools which can be used in other projects

Most developers will be interested in epub-tools.  Experimental projects will start in the search application, receive feedback from the digital publishing community, and get packaged up for distribution in epub-tools.

The tools project has only one application now: tei2epub.

The current version of tei2epub includes these recent changes:

1. The latest version of the validation utility epubcheck (0.9.5)
2. The NCX files now validate against the NCX DTD as well as epubcheck’s schema (thanks to Jon Noring for testing)
3. Some corrections were made to render TOCs more attractively in Adobe Digital Editions

To expand the project in useful ways I’d like to be able to add:

1. Other content types besides novels, especially reference
2. Content from other document formats, such as DocBook
3. Native, highly-tagged TEI documents

Wikipedia and its cohorts are by far the largest source of public domain data on the web now, but they aren’t encoded in XML. Publishers are unlikely to use wiki formatting to mark up their content and thus developing a workflow to convert from wiki to TEI doesn’t seem productive.

XML data welcome!

TEI is the Text Encoding Initiative, and is one of the most popular markup formats for printed works (especially in academics). All of the content on threepress has been converted from the Gutenberg format to TEI upon ingestion into the site.

epub is the shorthand for the e-book format proposed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), which uses XHTML and custom metadata formats. An e-book bundle is distributed in ZIP file format with its text and supplementary media “bound” together.

tei2epub is written in Python with XSLT. It also comes bundled with the latest version of epubcheck, for validating the output. It is meant to be used by developers rather than end-users (unlike the recent BookGlutton epub converter) and as most of the functionality is in the XSLT, should be easy to port to other languages. Like all threepress tools it is released under the BSD license which means it is free for all commercial and non-commercial use. You may download the ZIP version of the current release or get the latest version from svn at http://epub-tools.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

Current limitations:

1. tei2epub has not been tested on extensively marked-up TEI. It leverages the standard TEI to XHTML stylesheets distributed by TEI, but it is unknown whether epub readers will support all of the resulting markup
2. It accepts only a single source document (i.e. an entire TEI book)
3. It does not handle images or other kinds of media

Any of the above can be addressed with the addition of more complex TEI source books.

Edited May 22, 2008 to point resources at a new standalone repository.

I imagine applying techniques such as this to create algorithmic, generative book trailers, that exploit words in the text or use imagery derived from the web.

These two examples are the same program, threewords, running the text of Pride and Prejudice. Each time it displays a word, it records the frequency of that word. As terms appear more and more often, they zoom towards the viewer. Common words such as “the” are excluded. It would be possible to collapse all forms of a word to its common stem (the Xapian search engine used by threepress has stemming capability), but this version does not stem.

The first movie is of the initial four chapters, run at a readable speed:

The second is of the entire text, at 16X speed (2 minutes in length):

However, the application looks best when run locally. Processing exports standalone versions for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Source code is included in the application folders.

Look for more text-based movies in the coming months.