
Blanking Out - gruseom
https://sarahwerner.substack.com/p/blanking-out
======
jacobush
There is a similar problem with digitized photos, for instance from glass
plates. Often they had notes in margins or on the backside, but many scanning
efforts didn't take these into account. So a lot is lost forever, either
because the originals are destroyed, or forgotten in some archive.

~~~
gumby
In the precomputing era you could (legitimately!) get a PhD for building a
table of constants (e.g. log tables early on, later CRC data like steam tables
and curves). In the humanities you could get one for writing a concordance of
all the words in Shakespear or some other corpus, or all metaphors, and the
like. It's obvious how computation killed them.

But in a few years some enterprising grad student or post doc will earn
accolades by re-scanning some old sources, taking into account some important
metadata which right now is irrelevant. Perhaps labeling or annotating the
result in some novel way.

~~~
jcrawfordor
There's an interesting article somewhere that I really wish I could find right
now - the gist is that someone working at I think a dictionary publisher was
confused to find a filing cabinet that contained an index of every word
_reversed_ in alphabetical order. It took some thinking to realize that this
was a useful index to find all of the words that ended in a given suffix -
e.g. go to "gni" to find the gerunds.

It's interesting to think though that maintaining a dictionary once meant
having a large set of filing cabinets containing sheets of words sliced and
diced in every way you might need.

------
schoen
A 2009 paper shows that you can tell blank pages apart from one another by
examining them closely under a scanner: [https://citp.princeton.edu/our-
work/paper/](https://citp.princeton.edu/our-work/paper/)

So not only is there so much texture there, but even a single manufacturer's
individual blank pages differ dramatically because of physical wood fibers
within the page.

