In this paper, we present a workflow for reworking digitized versions of early modern books, freely available in the public domain, in such a way that they will be capable of yielding high-quality optical character recognition (OCR) results suitable for computational text mining. Testing our method, we observed that anything above 90% OCR accuracy is sufficient for semantic analysis. In addition, the overall homogeneity in the OCR accuracy across the corpus proved to be more important than having perhaps only a few works with higher accuracy and the rest available in a lower quality. In terms of the OCR process, this paper illustrates how it was possible to reduce the processing time at maximum quality of a single book of average length (ca. 500 pages) from a minimum of 20 hrs to an average of about 3 hrs (though theoretically nearly infinitely reducible). This was achieved by replacing a step-by-step OCR process with a fully automated pipeline system run on an arbitrary number of servers, breaking up the full process of OCRing one book into minimal tasks that can be handled simultaneously by multiple servers.
In this paper we will analyze the concept of incoherency that has been put forward by Jesper Juul in Half-Real (2005). Juul provides a paradigmatic example of an incoherency in the game Donkey Kong. The main character of the narrative, Mario, can die and subsequently reappear at the beginning of the level. However, when pressed to describe the narrative of the game, most players would not say that Mario ever died. The respawn is attributed to the game rules instead. Juul calls this phenomenon an incoherency of the game’s fictional world. We claim that the precise nature of the concept of incoherency is unclear, and that Juul's connection between incoherency and contradictions is incorrect. Furthermore, we argue that Wesp incorrectly identifies the concept with 'incompleteness' in his response to Juul (Wesp, 2014). Our clarification argues that what is noteworthy in 'incoherency' is not some aspect of the fictional world, like it being contradictory or incomplete, but how the player interprets the fiction. Subsequently, we provide an explanation for what underlies an incoherency by adopting the principle of charity (Davidson 1973). Lastly we discuss how a proper understanding of incoherency can help game designers and how it relates to ludonarrative dissonance (Hocking, 2009).
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