Massive Copyright Violations

Here you'll find:

• All of the readings that were in the set you bought from Graphic Arts, and
• All the handouts that Henry gave us before November 17 (which was when I left for Australia).

This stuff was all scanned in with a sheet-feeder (50 sheets at a time, plus flipping each stack over for the double-sided stuff) and OCR'ed with OmniPage Professional, a truly awesome OCR package for the Mac that can even cope with randomly-oriented originals, bad xeroxing, tilted text, a different page layout on each page, and double-sided originals---all of which were true for the course reader (*sigh*). It took a couple of days to run, with me frobbing the scanner every hour or so to flip a batch over or add the next one. The results are pretty good---certainly not as good as if the originals were available online, but definitely readable (I did the majority of my reading from the scanned data, not from the originals). Only the tiniest of footnote text in certain articles came out completely unreadable.

Note that I have not cleaned this stuff up at all. That's certainly not worth my time. Hence, you'll occasionally find stretches of garbage where the scanner saw poor xeroxing (e.g., black inner binding areas, etc), and tried valiantly to recognize it as characters; occasionally it moved most of a page over a bit because it thought that junk at the left made up a separate column; sometimes (rarely) it even missed a pair of facing pages and thought they were one big column. And, of course, a spelling checker would go absolutely bananas on this text. But a human can read it with no problems.

Note also that I have not done anything to actually separate the data into the separate readings, even for the handouts---it's just one big block of text. If someone would like to go through it and insert breaks, or even make a hypertext table of contents, be my guest: just let me know and I'll put the separated version back in place of this one. After all, I've done the hard work already for that.

Why did I do this? Several reasons:

• I never had the course reader with me when I wanted to read something in it; it was just too bulky to carry around with me all the time.
• Part of my trip to Australia involved four days of flying over the Outback in a Cessna 182. I knew months in advance that we'd be severely mass- and space-limited on that flight, but I also I knew I'd have a laptop with me anyway for other reasons. So I figured that putting the reader on the laptop (it's only 2.5meg, even uncompressed) would make it easy to read those things in it I needed to read, without adding any space or mass at all.

Of course, to minimize the chutzpah involved here, you need to be somewhere inside the MIT.EDU domain and to have already supplied the right username. I've already told you this if you're reading this, obviously.