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- I was looking at specific examples
of musical scores and novels
and really I wanted to find a shortcut.
How could I do the archival research quickly
without going to France and looking through
hundreds and hundreds of books?
- To do this in a statistically significant,
we need a lot of books to look at.
So, we're gonna look at hundreds of thousands of books.
Maybe millions of books.
You can teach the computer to understand
what music looks like when it has staff lines
as part of it, when it doesn't have staff lines, as well,
when it's denoted by words.
- My running hypothesis now is that there's a shift
in the late 18th century
and world culture becomes romanticized
and fabricated
and that's what I'm essentially hoping to find out.
Are there more and more fabrications of songs
that don't exist, that don't have any melody associated
with them, by the end of the 18th century?
- What Scott needs now is basically a master list
of French titles published during the 18th century
and in terms of a machine readable bibliography
of 18th century, that doesn't exist.
So, basically he wants to build one.
So what we want to do is build a French language equivalent
of the English Short Title Catalogue,
which is an index to titles published mainly in English,
but including other languages from 1473 to 1800.
- Mark Boettcher has made an interface to train the data.
So, we had two student workers, Jessica and Leah.
They would look at PDF documents
and highlight sections that either had lyrics,
that had musical scores, poems.
They were able to go through about 100 works.
50 in French and 50 in English
and we're gonna use
this data to scan 200,000 works.
- Wrote a paper.
We presented at a conference together.
You know, we've had a lot of conversations.
- I think even convincing John to write the
paper happened at this table.
I think I was sitting there
and John was there.
- One thing that's unique about Scott's project is that
we've made an effort, since the beginning of this summer,
for everyone to meet every week,
to sit down and say okay, what have you done so far,
what can I do, what is my role.
I think it's actually a great lesson for any kind
of scholarly or developmental project
that we do here,
because it really helps us understand
what it is that everyone else is doing
and where their expertise is coming from.
- It's discovering and this is really
what research computing does.
It's about discovery.
- I think the project moved along a lot faster
with the (inaudible) and we also got the expertise
of the library.
So, the body of people that came together on this is
exactly what's needed to make this kind of project work.
So, exactly what's needed.
- But also, we had a good time, I thought.
We laughed and we enjoyed ourselves this summer.
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