DISQUS

esjewett.com: Statistical misunderstandings and Google Book Search

  • N · 3 months ago
    I don't think it's a problem when you can type "Roberts, W. Rhys" into an author field and get Longinus's On the Sublime. That's a feature, not a bug.

    It's a problem, however, if the name Longinus appears nowhere on the record, because in that case a search on Longinus, the primary author, will never turn up that edition of On the Sublime. That's not a semantic disagreement; that's a mistake.

    (That's a made-up example, by the way.)
  • esjewett · 3 months ago
    Indeed, that would be a mistake. However I have never seen an actual example of such a mistake linked from a blog containing a complaint about mixing up translators and authors in Google Book Search. Much less an attempt at analysis of the pervasiveness of these mistakes as compared to similar mistakes in library metadata. Perhaps I've just been very unlucky in the blogs I've read.