Re: New York Times Archive


"Roger Mills" <watt.tyler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:6foc4hFcj24gU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In an earlier contribution to this discussion,
chrisj.doran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <chrisj.doran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In the hope that it's of use to someone: the New York Times
archive,
1851 to date, can be searched free at http://query.nytimes.com/
There's a small fee for for full view of some articles, but most
are
free upon registration. There seem to be quite a lot of UK-related
articles, often reprinted from UK papers, at least judging by my
one-
and-a-bit place study.

Articles are displayed as PDFs. Experiment shows that they save to
quite small files and there's little if any advantage in using the
Print Screen trick.

I couldn't find instructions for the search syntax, but experiment
shows that AND and OR may be used, but I couldn't get NOT to work.
Double quotes, as "Mary Smith" enable names to be searched for. Use
the Advanced search to specify a date range.

Chris

Thanks for the tip. Despite what Don says(!), the quality of OCR
conversion on which the indexing is based appears - from a brief
look - to be at least an order of magnitude better than that used by
The (London) Times archives.

That emphasises the point I was making! If the scanning was grotty and
the indexing obviously suspect, folk might be alert to reasons for not
finding what they are looking for. The 'better' the scanning and
indexing, the more faithful the product is to the original. So people
will think they can rely on the quality. They can't, because the
original is itself incompetently edited. If you enter 'Scottish' in a
search engine you won't find 'Scotch'. If you enter 'whiskey' you
won't find whisky. A fortiori, if you try to find something about
Scotch whisky you won't find articles on Scottish whiskey, whatever
that may be.

Apply the same argument to whatever search terms may be of interest to
you and you'll see why incompetent editing of input creates nightmares
for searchers not made aware of the incompetence. Conversely, if you
are aware that the input is imperfect you may be ready to bring into
play the work-rounds to which we get so used when searching through
the imperfect records used in genealogy.

The other 'health warning' is that NYT isn't written in English
English. It's written in American English and those who seek to search
NYT archives therefore have to think in American, especially as
regards to spelling. It requires a conscious effort for most of us.
We're not all truly bilingual as is Cousin Drew. He talks, writes and
walks like an American until somewhere over the mid-Atlantic and then
switches to talking, writing and walking like an Englishman. I've seen
him do it in the space of a few steps when crossing a room to talk to
English at an American reception, and vice versa. He doesn't seem to
realise what an unusual talent it is. My misfortune is that I can't
persuade him to do searches on American sources for me. He positively
won't use computers for anything! So for me the 'translation' problem
is an ever-present reality when searching.

Don


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Relevant Pages

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  • Re: American English Abroad
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    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: New York Times Archive
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  • Re: New York Times Archive
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