Outside AI

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AI can’t get hold of everything because an awful lot of stuff is not online, and it doesn’t all make easy reading. Not even to the human eye.

I write my stories about Lendorph & la Cour based on reality – a lot of it from files at the National Archives. On paper. In stacks of boxes. One time I scanned some 1200 pages and took photographs of what the scanner couldn’t cope with. I also use the newspapers of the past which are online but if you have tried copy-paste of a paper from around 1900, you realise that it is not all that easy. Luckily, I can read the gothic letters and the handwriting of the time, and that is absolutely necessary.

At the National Archives I sometimes find material like this – as evidence used in court cases:

a large unfolded piece of paper holding scraps of paper with text written in dark blue ink in cursive. not possible to read

 

a close up photo of a page of the police report in columns with corrections and additions written in a neat cursive not too hard to read if you can read cursive

 

And this bit of cursive handwriting is actually very neat and easy to reed.

A newspaper article can look like this:

an article cutout from a 1910 paper in different typefaces - headline easy to read but the main text is in a gothic typeface that takes some getting used to

And the ‘translation’ if you try machine reading to pdf is really of no use – and this is the edited version, the original gives you one word per line):

‘Ester at Christoffersen var bleven anholdt « Forgaars AsteS og afleveret til Ar-resten paa Nytorv, tog OpdageUeSbrljeiitene H e r f t i n d og Restrup atter ud i Schon-bcrgsgade, hvor de gmncmsogte C h r i s t o f -s e r s c n s Bavelse og sandt Revolveren i en Koinmodlstuffe…’

Even if you don’t read Danish it isn’t hard to see that something is not quite right.

Fact and fiction

News then, just as now, was chosen by someone, given an angle and often part of some discussion or other as papers at the time were quite frank about their political affiliations. And there were a lot of them. So, when I read about a case, I get several angles and interpretations – sometimes a bit confusing, when the papers of the day – sometimes the actual day the crime was committed – don’t all agree on where it was committed, nor when nor how. They often revel in assorted guesswork when the story has to meet the deadline and facts are as yet not really forthcoming. At least with the different versions – and my privilege of knowing what happens next as I read at a 110 years delay, I can choose what fits the verdict at the end, when facts are finally available – and comment in my ‘fact and fiction’ pages.

What AI makes of contradictory information I do not know. It might get interesting. AI doesn’t really distinguish between fact and fiction. I do. And I’ll keep doing so.

Anduin ©