Forum: Author Hangout

He can make a reasonable guess at where every member is located based on the primary IP they access the site from.

For paid memberships, if you know how to read the credit card numbers, the number will tell you what bank issued it and from which country.

Even if he never personally sees the CC numbers, the bank routing information on the payments when the show up in the sites accounts will likely provide the same information.

I don't recall what information is asked for during the registration process, but I expect he could produce an analysis of those figures fairly easily.

Since it's his business I think it's reasonable to assume he already has done that. Whether he wants to publish these informations is an all together different question.

Whether he wants to publish these informations is an all together different question.

Yes. I've never known him to object to being asked for something, or to have any problem just stating, "I won't do that," when he has his reasons.

It's Lazeez's site, but I like to think the authors, editors, reviewers and readers share in the investment of keeping in moving in a forwards direction.

I don't object that statement, but published statistics about SoL's customers would not only be useful to sympathetic people.

Lazeez, Lazeez, on the Net
Do you have an answer to our request?

(Okay, so the rhyme is a little off)

Lazeez, Lazeez, our esteemed webmaster
We have a question, do you have an answer?

I don't know, maybe I'm not a good business person for not collecting that data. I just never bothered.

That may be true, but you're the perfect person to be running this site. There are more than enough sites tracking every move a person makes; at least there's one that doesn't. Thank you!

Big Google is watching you - that's scary.

Facebook is not as all knowing as they'd like to be. Last week they let me know that Elizabeth Mead and I became friends on Facebook three years age. She's my sister, we've been friends all my life. Which, from what I've observed, cannot be said of all siblings.

Google isn't as observant as they think, either. Given the percentage of my searches dealing with academic research, you'd think they might adjust their search algorithms for me to actually recognize W. E. Collins as a search for W. E. Collins, not we Collins. Some searches can't be done on Google (ok, not just google) because of their assumptions about what an allowable search term is, and their assumptions as to what has to be a mistyping. In academic publishing, until extremely recently, you _never_ used your full name. It was always your surname and initials. So searching W. E. Collins on Google gave me lots of Phil Collins song lyrics. On the Internet Archive, it gave me W. E. Collins, so it _can_ be done.

Didn't make a difference. Based upon my experience, they don't really pay that much attention to the quote marks. "W. E. Collins" still gave me pages of Phil Collins song lyrics before anything else, their spelling correction assumptions appear to have priority. Some spellings they tell you they are searching on a correction of what you typed, but give you the option of searching on what you actually typed, they don't do that with a whole bunch of others, the change is made before it gets to the search system, they appear to have a pre-search system typo correction filter; for most searches this probably works in their favor, but there are fields of knowledge that are practically impossible to research because of it. All the major search engines seem to do this. Given the number of typos I make, I can't blame them, but they don't have a selection in their advanced search menu that allows for a character by character match with what you type bypassing their typo correction filters. Due to this, some things cannot be found out using the major search engines. A search on S. Ing. will always become a search on sing, instead of returning Saint Ignatius, for whom S. Ing. was the abbreviation used for over five hundred years of scholarly publication. I know that for certain, because I tried that search; I had to resort to searching the Internet Archive, which _does_ treat S. Ing. as S. Ing.

Google and the other major "free" search engines are good for casual searching and general knowledge, but the very things that make them good at that make them useless for in depth research of a great many fields, you have to access specialized search engines, which are generally only available to someone associated with a Research University or Major Corporation; they all charge big access fees to support themselves, while Google, etc., generate advertising revenue and revenue from their specialized services; people grouse about the information mining Google does, but that's what makes it possible for them to provide a "free" service; we're paying for it by helping them gather information to sell to businesses to help them target potential customers. The specialized search engines, with their subject specific databases, don't have secondary markets, so they have to make their money from those using them as a search engine; some of them will allow individuals to purchase access to their search engines and thus their databases, but most limit it to organizations; if nothing else, few individuals can afford what they have to charge, so for most it would not be cost effective to even provide the option of individual, non-institution accounts, it would cost them more than they'd bring in. It's not as bad as it could be, as the larger Public libraries can get access to some of them, and if you have a library account with that library system you can access them via the library web site, but if you live in a less well funded library system, access is not possible. My sister can access the Online OED via her library system, I can't via mine. We live less than a hundred miles apart. When I worked at the Chicago Public Library, they had a fee based online search service, where they would consult with the client, formulate a search using the search term thesauri for the various databases, and then go online with some of the fee-based databases to see what they could find; the cost of each search was such that they had to charge the end user for the search, but this made it possible for individuals and firms who couldn't afford the monthly subscription fees to gain access for tightly focused searches; CPL is _huge_ and could offer this service, 99% of Public Libraries can't, they don't have the staff or budget.

Access to general knowledge can be subsidized by the secondary revenue streams. Where there are no secondary revenue streams, the end user has to pay for it. Simple economics. For most of the population this isn't a problem, as they don't desire access to that specialized knowledge. I happen to want access to it, and am not associated with academia in a formal manner, so I'm SOL. I'm an economically non-viable market, and so long as I live in a free market society, that's how it will be. I don't know that it's any better in a Socialist country such as Sweden, I haven't investigated what is made available via their public libraries, if they receive enough government financial support to be able to provide access to those databases. If I became a premier member of Academia.edu I'd get access to the Online OED, that's one of their marketing points, but I'd need to know what other databases it would provide me access to before I looked into how much it would cost me each month.

But this is _very_ off topic by now. Hope I didn't bore anyone too much.

EDIT: OH My Fucking GOd, that's a whole BLOG Posting!
EDIT 2: Encyclopedia Britannica, not the Online OED, is what Academia.edu provides access to with premier membership.

But this is _very_ off topic by now. Hope I didn't bore anyone too much.

I just pretended it was a sex scene and skipped over it.

I'd have _sworn_ I'd tried that and it didn't work; in fact, that huge info dump I did was from that perspective. But, I just tried it, and you are right. While a couple of "we"'s slipped in, it _did_ pull up a number of W E Collins. but unless he switched from the history of early Frisia to English Ecclesiastical History, none concerning _my_ W. E. Collins in the first 200 entries, at which point there appeared the dreaded Google message saying they really weren't going to provide anything more. So I tried "S. Ing." After 28 pages, and having to confirm I wasn't a robot, they _still_ hadn't come up with Saint Ignatius. Lot's of clear misspellings of s ing, but not S. Ign. as an abbreviation for Saint Ignatius.

Edit: Just checked the Advanced Search options. You can limit by how old the information is on the Web, i.e. how long ago it was entered. You can have it search a range numbers, and add something to define what the number refers to, such as lb.. So I tried S Ing exact match, with 1500 AD - 1800 AD. Yes, the results had numbers between 1500 and 1800, and occurrences of AD. Any AD, not just AD as short for Anno Domini. The AD didn't need to be one space away from the number, just in the same paragraph. ads counted as a hit for AD. Nine pages in and only a couple of hits for pre-1800, no Saint Ignatius abbreviation. So while I was wrong about _why_ Google, etc., isn't any good for certain types of research, I was _right_ that they aren't. Bummer. I would have been _ecstatic_ to have been proven completely wrong, as it would have meant Google would meet my needs.

The other most useful option is to use the minus sign.

Thanks. I did not know about this.

Ernest,

"W. E. Collins" and "S. Ign." were totally unrelated searches that I'd experienced recently, so conjoining them would not have helped me. I just tried "S. Ing." and it _did_ drop the punctuation. When I searched using a number range delimitation of 1500 AD to 1800 AD, 1-800 was highlighted as a match; my experience is that Google strips punctuation, and ignores it in it's results; "s-ing" and "using" (with the "sing" highlighted) were highlighted results of "S. Ing." S. Ing. was the standard abbreviation in the Catholic Church and academic circles for at least three hundred years, but you won't find it in the online abbreviation sites that Google retrieves, and you won't find it in Google's search results. The full item I was searching for was from a holding library label, "Bibl. Prag. S. J. et S. Ing.", the poster had wanted to know what that meant. Searching the whole phrase pulled up one hit in the one search engine I found anything on, and that was the book the OP had seen. S. J. is the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits; _that_ search Google returned it as the first hit. With it being a library ID label, Bibl. is Biblioteca, Library, in many variant tongues; it also expands as Bible, Bibliography, Bibliographic. Prag. is most likely the city of Prague, it was a standard abbreviation, and the other possible expansions of Prag. that I could confirm were ridiculous in context. Documenting defunct libraries is tough; while there is an extant library in Prague that was founded by the Jesuits, a rather famous library, as far as I could tell it never used that designation; that doesn't mean it didn't, because I couldn't find anything solid about what it used to be called, and it changed management when the Society of Jesus was disbanded; the current Society of Jesus is the second creation of that order, there's a period where it didn't exist. The modern library associations don't concern themselves with libraries that no longer exist, at least not on their web sites; they focus on library education and advocacy, improving the viability of modern libraries. I was trying to find documentation outside of my memory for the meaning of the various components of the library ID. Since Google, in my experience with this search, is ignoring punctuation even if it's inside the quotation marks, excluding the false positives becomes difficult; limiting by a term works if you have a lot of false hits for a term, and few positive hits with the term to be excluded, and I used -Colorado with "W. E. Collins" from the start because of a very famous Collins Drive in Colorado (Famous? I'd never heard of it, but 75% of the first page, or so it seemed, referred to it), that's where I hoped the number range delimitation in the Advanced Search form would help by allowing me to limit the results to the time period where the abbreviation was universally in use, but since Google doesn't treat the items in the range field as unitary, and considered 1,800 1-800 and 18.00 the same as 1800, and ads as a match for AD, they were all highlighted in the results, it didn't return only those items with a date in the text between 1500 AD and 1800 AD. Now, what really gets my goat, is some of the sources I was able to verify as having S. Ing. as an abbreviation for St. Ignatius, and for the other search the W. E. Collins I was looking for, are items held by Google Books. Yes, by searching Google Books specifically, they would probably have turned up. The Internet Archive, being a much more focused data set, pulled them up right away. I'm not really surprised Google didn't turn up my W. E. Collins, he's pretty obscure, but S. Ing. for Saint Ignatius isn't something I think of as obscure, not in my fields of interest. Except, Google doesn't have access to the proprietary databases which store the electronic versions of the scholarly journals, nor the proprietary databases which store the converted primary source materials for Renaissance and Early Modern history and culture, just the .pdfs they've created at Google Books, and other open depositories such as the Internet Archive. The items of my search aren't things talked about much on web sites Google can index. They show up in the text of historic documents, and modern conversations use the modern abbreviations unless directly quoting a primary source. It's just frustrating that if I'm researching a computer related term it shows up instantly, if I'm searching for anything relating to modern society it doesn't take that much to narrow down, given the right exclusions and inclusions, but historic information is so much harder to find when using non-unique search terms, since the "free" search engines focus on bringing up the most recent information first, and where possible those items closest to you geographically. Google works for general information of the modern age. For legal information you search LexisNexis, for other things ProQuest, Cengage, and a variety of others which provide access to proprietary databases, and they all charge quite hefty fees for access, such that in general you have to be associated with either a University or a major firm in the field, or have access to the more general of them through a major library.

My experience is that Google does _not_ do a character by character match of what you put inside the " ", they ignore the punctuation, and they will ignore the spacing. I just searched "S. Ing.", the first hit is "Urban Dictionary: s'ing d's"; they ignored the spacing, the capitalization, the punctuation; nothing in that entry was an exact match of my search string. They treat " " as a proximity constraint, the items have to be very close together, in that order, but since they ignore punctuation and spacing not exact matches. They do _not_ do a true Boolean search, since they _don't_ do a character by character match, including case and punctuation and spacing. Doesn't really matter, in the end, I don't think, other than .pdfs of historic books and journals, that they have access to the databases having information related to these two searches. W. E. Collins only seems to be mentioned in publications of the Cambridge Press for 1890-1893; he had a book in preparation with them that didn't get published. A couple of other mentions in 1890, since his dissertation had won a prestigious award, the revision of it was what Cambridge Press was planning to publish as part of their Cambridge Historical Essays series; a search on "Cambridge Historical Essays" on Google does bring up most of the series as .pdfs, including the ones mentioning W. E. Collins; it also brings up "Cambridge : Historical Essays" as the first hit, again ignoring punctuation. I've sent an email to the Archivist at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he got his degree, to see if they had any further info on him, such as his full name, but haven't heard anything back, nor do I really expect to. S. Ing., at the Internet Archive, pulled up a lot of documents; the Internet Archive _does_ seem to pay attention to punctuation and spacing inside of " ", as well as being composed of a higher percentage of relevant documents. But a lot of those documents are also in Google Books, and Google should have pulled them up with a true " " treatment.

YOU CAN SEARCH FOR ANYTHING.

You can replace any special symbol with a percent sign and the number of the symbol you want. You must have seen %20 within URLs numerous times. That's because 20 is the number allocated to the space symbol.

I don't know which character set is used, but once you have the right one you'll be able to search for anything.

SORRY, THAT'S NOT WORKING

google.com converts special characters it finds in the dialog that way.
When I tested a search including %20, it converted that and sent a request including %2520 (because 25 is the number for a % sign).
Sigh!

THIS IS HOW I FOUND "W. E. COLLINS"

I put that in the dialog box, and the results were useless.
I then edited the request that had just been sent. I replaced four '+' signs with '%20' and then hit return.
The section I amended looked this "W.%20E.%20COLLINS"&oq="W.%20E.%20COLLINS".
I was using google.com.au, and the first thing it returned was details from the Australia War Memorial about a "Private W E Collins" who was awarded a military medal during the first world war.

Tried it. Took me a bit to realize you started with a normal "W. E. Collins" search, but once I figured that out, it worked. for finding W. E. Collins. Not _my_ W. E. Collins, but indeed it zeroed right in on W. E. Collins.

Doing the same thing with "S.%20Ing."&oq="S.%20Ing." replacing the search command generated by "S. Ing." had the problem of too many false positives, again.

The first screen is almost all "s'ing" matches, or other results that say Google considers punctuation to be a blank space in results as well as searches. One false positive was "S***ing", as in expurgated Shitting as profanity in news reports (it was about a Sports figure), so it doesn't matter how many punctuation symbols, they get treated as one blank space. "-s,-ing" was a hit. Also clear that the full stop isn't required for a hit. Might try adding the ASCII code for full stop after the letter but before the space code to see if that would make it require a full stop.

Did pull up Todd S Ing and Andrew S Ing in the first five pages, which was an improvement, as was no sing or using as matches.

So to get rid of matches with punctuation in the positives, I'd have to do searches excluding those matches then modify the output with the ASCII character string for the punctuation character in the exclusion part of the search string? This only has a chance of working if they actually examine the non-alphanumeric characters, instead of assigning them all the value of blank space, and the search results indicate they treat all of them as if they were a blank space. Rather, they treat them as a null string, white noise, they don't give them a value at all. At least that's what it seems like to me.

Um, just checked. S. Ing., no quotes, the space gets ditched, as do the full stops. it treats it as a search on"sing", even though it shows S. Ing. as the search term. Placing" " around the search terms prevents them from being slammed together as the default actual search, but non-alphanumeric characters count as blank spaces. Modifying the search by replacing the + in the search results with %20 came up with results _identical_ to the search without the %20 character code; non-alphanumeric characters are classified as a blank space by Google's search engine. "W E Collins" and "W. E. Collins" produce identical search results.

Just spotted something. The W. E. Collins search still has we Collins matches in the first two pages of results, where it was clear from context that it _was_ the word "we" no space that triggered the hit.

I'm not sure what to think about Ernest's argument about Google only accessing web site provided metadata. I have a blog. I've never entered tags. I've never entered anything resembling metadata, to my knowledge, unless the title of the blog post would be metadata. I've been contacted by the web store I purchased a product from that I reviewed on my site; contact was via the comments section of the blog. I didn't name the tool in the post title, not did I name the company in the post title. I just tried to pull that particular post up via a web search, and failed. I _did_ link to their site for the picture of the product. However, _another_ post where I mentioned their firm _did_ turn up in a search on their name and the name of my blog. "Garrett Wade" "not so random thoughts" The title of the post is "Dandelions", so that wouldn't be the metadata indexing. Searching "lee valley" and "not so random thoughts" pulled up _two_ posts mentioning them; both searches also reported the main page of my blog. For both searches there were other posts that mentioned them that were not returned as hits. No mention of Lee Valley in either post's title. One post was returned by both searches; I'd mentioned a gardening tool they both sold. No links inside either post. So, somehow, without any metadata that I'm aware of, Google found two posts that I've made on my blog. Searching "Grandpa's weeder" "not so random thoughts" also pulled up that post; that's the tool. The other post where Garrett Wade is mentioned, searching on the tool as I labelled it along with the blog name didn't pull it up. So not everything got indexed. "clematis" "not so random thoughts" pulls up two posts, both have clematis in the post's title. There were more posts concerning clematis that didn't get pulled up; it had taken over the back yard, but I eradicated it in one season; I posted about it quite regularly for a bit. Pretty flowers, but most invasive, and it climbs over _everything_. As I said, I didn't knowingly create any metadata, I _know_ I've never used tags with any of my posts. Somehow Google has partially indexed my blog by things not mentioned in post titles. Blogger _is_ owned by Google, it's always possible they're creating metadata for the blogs on Blogger.

EDit: It's _what_ time of day? I haven't gone to bed yet, it _can't_ be 5:00 AM!

Doing the same thing with "S.%20Ing."&oq="S.%20Ing." replacing the search command generated by "S. Ing." had the problem of too many false positives, again.

So, if you we're capable of writing a short version :), it would be, "Getting there ... but, geez!" Right?

You might need to start using something like:
"S.%20Ing.-%33-%35"&oq="S.%20Ing.-%33-%35"
... assuming 33 and 35 are the right numbers for an apostrophe and a star.
What a pain!

Some will scan some of the content, but not all do that, and there is no consistent manner in how much of the content they scan or why.

So without deliberately entering metadata, whether anyone will ever find the information in a given post is unlikely. So I need to learn how to attach metadata to my blog posts, if I think I'm saying anything someone else might find of interest. And learn to be concise in summarization for said metadata, and learn what the accepted terminology is. Hey! If I succeed, maybe I'll be able to post on Twitter!

Why is "Ing." short for "Ignatius"?

Oh God. How long have I been going S. Ing. instead of S. Ign.?

Thank you for raising that question. You were correct, S. Ing. isn't an abbreviation for St Ignatius, S. Ign. is the abbreviation. S. Ign. is what showed up in the search request at ABE Booksearch which got me started on this.

Didn't change the results of the searches, except the confusion is with sign instead of sing. And knowing that, I first wrote "except the confusion was with sing instead of sing." "Augh," to paraphrase Charlie Brown.

Makes it ironic that my current project is a letter by letter transcription of "Vincentio Saviolo his Practise", a 1595 English translation of an Italian fencing manual.

Can't use a spell checker for a letter by letter transcription, especially given how irregular the spelling is in the original (at least three different spellings for some words), that only helps with part two, the normalized EModE (Early Modern English) spelling version, and part three, the modern spelling version. It makes it a lot easier if you use VARD 2 for the normalization process, it uses carefully developed dictionaries and substitution algorithms, it's free to use, but they want an academic email address to obtain a copy. My hope is that if I can present them with good clean copy of this project they'll let me have a copy even though I don't have an academic email address. Have to prove I'm a legit fellow traveler.

The kicker is that I'm not just going for a modern typeface for the text, I'm formatting the text, including images from the source .pdf, to match the original document, which is _not_ how this is done. I'm trying to reproduce the document as if it had been printed using Times New Roman, instead of that godawful Elizabethan typeface.

I'm doing this backward, I produced a modern spelling version formatted this way back in 2013, copy at John Mead's Academia.edu page and Internet Archive, which the Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) crowd was happy to find out about, for them it being formatted to match the original makes it much more useful than a text document of the transcription, now I'm trying to recreate the intermediate documents for the use of the academics. And to establish my methodology for future transcriptions. I'm finding places where I misread the original document, so going over it again needed to be done.

It keeps me occupied. Being on Disability Retirement, I have lots of free time. It produces something of real use to certain interest groups, which makes me feel better about myself.

Dyslexics _know_ they have to refer back to the source materials. I'm constantly reminded of that, yet I keep messing up.

"Similar to xxx by xxx"

Must be "much sex". (X rated is some sex.)