Last month I launched socialistresistance.redmole.org as an archive of the magazine, newspaper, talks and website previously published by Socialist Resistance. No matter how good my intentions were, the articles' accuracy is deplorable. Because Socialist Resistance deserves a better legacy, I’m asking every Red Mole reader to visit the site and read a couple of articles until they find a fault.
The good news is also the bad news: it won’t take you long to find a fault.
It’s a big site. Millions of words. Several thousand files. A few hundred authors. Dozens of talks. There’s plenty of room for errors.
The most common
Garbled text. This is first and hardest to avoid. Two columns being “read into each other” points to a common OCR problem with multi-column newsprint. Many scanned archives have the same weakness: in the Irish Left Archive, half the pages are scanned at 100 dpi or less, as JPEG photos of newsprint.
Articles starting or ending in the wrong place. Each issue had to be split into separate articles automatically, and that splitting goes wrong in both directions: two pieces get merged, or one piece gets split. I’ve seen the same problem elsewhere. Article boundaries are “loose”, and some rows are marked “inferred” because text spilt over from the neighbouring article.
Wrong or missing authors. The archive admits that bylines were “read out of the prose.” That means a name mentioned in an article can be taken for its author. Any author index has to separate bylines from mentions for exactly this reason, and it’s hard.
A smaller, separate group
Transcript errors. These only affect the recorded talks. The transcripts started from YouTube’s automatic captions and are corrected by hand, so names, organisation acronyms and foreign terms are where errors are most likely.
The bad news is the good news in one other way. If we spot several similar errors then we can automate the fix.
The last item in the archive’s menu bar says “Report an error“. Click that, and the error form should be pre-populated with the name of the page. Submit it, and we’ll check it out. If you can, select one of the options to tell us what the problem is.
And, if you’re an author and you want your article taken down or put under a pen name, then let me know. I read my first article in Socialist Outlook and, wow, it was not great. No shame if you want something to disappear 25 years later, especially if its’s a film review.
Thank you
Readers come here to read, not to do unpaid work for archives. And Red Mole readers come here to read what our legacy means when it’s applied today’s world. But the truth is that we can’t do this legacy justice, and we can’t learn from its mistakes and successes, unless we do this work of growing and improving our archives and improving their quality.
Just a beginning
There’s more to come. Today, Resistance Books agreed to start the online publishing of an extensive archive of resolutions of the Fourth International, which I am also working on. The more we can do today to learn how to fix the issues that arise from archival scanning, the faster we can put these resources into more hands.
Visit the archive today at
https://socialistresistance.redmole.org/