Word Frequency In The New York Times

The New York Times has introduced a new feature that lets you check how many times a specific word or phrase has been used in the paper since a way back in 1851. Go here to check it out: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com.

It brings up a graph showing the frequency of your query. I was curious about The Times's use of the word "fraught", which seemed to be in a great many articles of late. So I typed "fraught" into the search and the output looked thus:

The results surprised me a bit. The year 2011 has the most uses by far, and will likely continue to outpace 2014.

Now, if I wanted to know which articles "fraught" appeared in I can click on the red dot there on the upper right. That brings up a list (with links) of 609 stories in which the word was used.

Useful and fun. Try it yourself. 'Til next time . . .

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog. 

Disclaimer: The description of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.

Naval Academy Yearbooks

What did Samuel David Dealey do when he was a student at the U.S. Naval Academy in the late 1920's? Not much, it turns out. I know this because there is a digital collection of Annapolis yearbooks available online. Here is the link to the Nimitz Library Digital Collection. The actual yearbooks are hosted over on the Internet Archive.

The best way to access the yearbooks is through the Nimitz link. All issues from the first one, in 1894, through 1970 are available.

So what about our fellow, Sam Dealey? I wanted to find out more about this guy for an article I was writing for a military history magazine. Sam went on to be one of the ace submariner skippers of World War II, and one of the most decorated serviceman in American history. What was he like at Annapolis?

He graduated in 1930, and each graduate was given a write-up by his friends that sort of encapsulated how they viewed him and his personality.

Go the the landing page (link above) and then look for Browse All in the upper left. A list with all the yearbooks loads. Scroll down to 1930 and click on that. When the 1930 page opens click on the link next to the cover photo. This opens the book in the Internet Archive. Type Samuel Dealey (or whoever or whatever) into the search box and click Go and wait. In Sam's case, six bookmarks popup - only one of which is relevant to our project, his class listing on page 198.

 

Over there on the left is our guy. The listing includes his nicknames (only "Sam" stuck) and the activities he was involved in during his four years at the Academy. This information helped give me a broader picture of who Sam Dealey was. It was worth the effort.

The Nimitz Library has a wide range of archival collections available to researchers, and more and more are being digitized. I'd like to thank Dr. Jennifer Bryan, Head of Special Collections for helping me find this stuff.

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog. 

Disclaimer: The description of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.

Using Photoshop to Improve PDF Image Files

Ever had a scan of a document that you can’t read because it’s either too light or too dark? I get that all the time in my research of military sources. It’s a real pain.

But wait! There may be a solution (or semi-solution, anyway). Photoshop to the rescue!

For a long time I’d wondered if a PDF can be opened in Photoshop with an eye on improving the image quality. Recently I had the opportunity to try it on some files of WWII submarine war patrol reports, and it worked pretty well.

Little background: When a U.S. submarine went out on a combat patrol in WWII the captain was responsible for turning in a detailed, day-by-day account of the voyage (which was often 6-8 weeks long). If he attacked an enemy ship he had to note all sorts of details, including the serial numbers of the torpedoes and how good the food was. A typical patrol report ran 40-60 pages. By the end of the war there were nearly 1600 of these on file. In the 1970’s the Navy began to microfilm this pile of paper, and they didn’t always do a very good job, resulting in page images that were dark or light and hence, sometimes nearly unreadable. Now all the microfilmed reports are available on line at: http://hnsa.org/doc/subreports.htm.

The PDF file I was working with, the five patrols made by USS Harder (SS257), was 325 pages long. That’s a big file, in terms of page quantity. And I only needed to improve four or five of those pages.

Here’s the technique:

Open the PDF in Photoshop. Up comes a window showing a thumbnail image of each page, with page numbers below the image.

Choose the pages you want to fix by clicking on the thumbnail. You can open as many as you want; just hold down the shift key and click. Click OK and the pages will load. The file bar will string each of the image names in descending order.

Click on the page you want to fix and it will open in the Photoshop window.

The screen shot shows a page that is almost too light to read legibly. 

How to fix (or at least improve - the easiest way is to go to IMAGE>ADJUSTMENTS>LEVELS. 

A window with three sliders will open. Black level is on the left, White on the right, Gray in the center. Make sure the “Preview” box is checked. Now, slide the sliders around and watch the changes to the document. Fiddle until you can’t get a better result. Click OK.

Image too dark? Same technique.

Caveat: you can almost always improve a page image, but it’s rare that you’ll be able make it look like it just came off the typewriter.

You can now crop the image, if you need to.

Then save the file under a different name (you can’t save a manipulated page back into your original PDF).

Here is the improved version:

Typically, I print these guys out because I like having hardcopy to read from when I’m writing my article (in this case for World War II magazine). But you can just as well read them off the screen.

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog. 

Disclaimer: The descriptions of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.

Finding The Value Of The 1872 Dollar Today

At some point in your research/writing activities it’s quite likely you found yourself needing to know how money has appreciated over the past century or more. Here’s one example I was tangling with recently:

Away back in 1872 a pair of Kentucky cousins managed to swindle $600,000 from some of the smartest, wiliest financial men of New York and San Francisco. The pair got off scot-free. And  virtually none of the loot was ever recovered.

So how much is $600,000 worth today?

To find out all I have to do is go to a really useful website called MeasuringWorth. It was founded by a pair of professors back in 2006 with the mission of making reliable data available to the public about value comparison over time.

To try out one of their calculators, from the home page click Relative Values– US $ from the left-hand column.

This brings up a page that will “Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount – 1774 to Present.”

In the window on the right all you have to do is fill in your parameters. In my case, the Initial Year is 1872 and the Initial Amount is $600,000. Because of the way the calculator is set up, set the Desired Year for last year or the year before.

Now click CALCULATE.  

The answer is not exactly simple or clear cut. MeasuringWorth gives you nine different values.

At the top of the page it says “In 2012 the relative value of $600,000 from 1872 ranges from $10,400,000 to $1,170,000,000.” That’s quite a range!

Below that is a box that says “A simple Purchasing Power Calculator would say the relative value is $11.6 million.”

What’s the best number to choose?

Reading through the definitions of the various value categories is helpful. But for folks like me, who are not well grounded in economics, it’s seriously confusing.

It’s easy enough to pick the $1.17 billion number—a sensational eye-opener worthy of Bernie Madoff. But I think a conservative value is more realistic and better serves my purpose. So for my book about the Kentucky cousins’ $600,000 swindle I chose $11.6 million, because it relates most closely to the “real price” and the “historic standard of living value.” And by anybody’s standard (except maybe the “Top 1%’s”) eleven million dollars is a lot of money.

MeasuringWorth.com also calculates other currencies, including the British pound sterling, the Australian pound and dollar, and China and Japan.

There is also a conversion calculator from dollars to pounds. How much was one British pound worth in dollars in 1890? Answer: $4.86. 

The Internet is full of sites offering these sorts of data conversions and analysis. And that’s what Finding Stuff is all about.

Happy New Year!

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog. 

Disclaimer: The description of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.

JPASS A Boon To Researchers

Regular readers of these columns will recall my complaints about really useful research sites which make you sign up for a year’s subscription even though you only need to make a few visits over the course of a week or two.

One of my favorite archival sites is the Times of London. And as I mentioned a couple of posts ago, this past summer they began to offer the Web Pack. First of all, it was cheap—$3 a week. And secondly, and most importantly to a periodic user, you can sign up for as little as one month —$12. A bargain for the right to search three centuries of history.

Which brings us to JSTOR.
 

JSTOR is a not-for-profit shared digital library created in 1995 to help university and college libraries free space on their shelves, save costs, and provide greater levels of access to more content than ever before. By digitizing content to high standards and supporting its long-term preservation, JSTOR aims to expand access to scholarly content around the world and to preserve it for future generations.

JSTOR currently includes more than 2,000 academic journals, dating back to the first volume ever published, along with thousands of monographs and other materials relevant for education. They have digitized more than 50 million pages and continue to digitize approximately 3 million pages a year. 

Though designed mainly for institutions, JSTOR has recognized that independent researchers would benefit from access to these vast databases. That’s why they created JPASS—a tool for folks like us that lets us browse or search over 7 million articles in 1500 journals on hundreds of subjects for as little as $19.50 month.

JPASS enables subscribers to read an unlimited number of articles in what they call the JPASS COLLECTION, and to download up to 10 of those a month (PDF).

I’ve been doing research on Presbyterian missionaries in Asia during the World War II period. And so I was pleased to find a variety of Presbyterian Historical Society publications available on JSTOR.

I chose the Journal of Presbyterian History (1997-2009), and typed Philippines missionaries into the search box.

There were 789 results, so I scrolled down through them until I found one that seemed to fit what I was looking for (it’s not shown on the image, but it’s called “The Presbyterian Mission on Hainan Island Under the Japanese, 1937-1941.”

Not needing to print the PDF, I just read through the article on the screen.

Overall the user interface on JSTOR/JPASS is pretty clean and intuitive, but it will take some effort to master it.

It’s great that a resource like JSTOR is now available to the hoi polloi. I hope that other databases that restrict public access realize they are missing out on a great revenue generator that also happens to be a great public service.

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog.

Disclaimer: The description of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.

Federal Shutdown Interfering With Your Research? Try This.

If you've tried to access Federal government websites in the past week you know they don't work because of the shutdown. This is not a political forum  - it's all about research, and thanks to the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" a bunch of agencies' websites are still available to facilitate researching.

Start by going here: http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/02/governmentblackout/

That brings up the "Blacked Out Government Websites Available Through Wayback Machine."

There are a total of  13 agencies whose websites you can access:  NOAA, NPS, LOC, NSH, FCC, Census, USDA, USGS, ITC, FTC, NASA, ITA, and Corp for National Service. Just click on the links below the logos.

I checked out the LOC site and was able to go into digitized Historic Newspapers and do full searches of dates in the late 19th Century. That's pretty far into the site, so there must be all sorts of stuff (maybe everything?) available.

So, YAY! for the Internet Archive. These good folks are always looking for additional funding. If you use the Blacked Out sites, please make a contribution. I know I will.

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog. 

Disclaimer: The description of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.

Submarines on the Web: The Historical Naval Ships Association

My research specialty is the Pacific Theater in World War II, with a focus on submarine warfare. In the past, to do research about the “war in the boats” it was necessary to make a trip to National Archives II at College Park, Maryland, because that’s where the really important primary materials live: the sub commanders’ “patrol reports” for the fifteen hundred-odd combat sorties made by U.S. submarines during WWII.

The patrol reports were very detailed, day-by-day accounts—diaries really—of events from the time the boat left its base until it returned sixty to ninety days later. These documents are not the same as the ship’s log, which kept track of things like speed, distance traveled, fuel used, weather and ocean conditions. The patrol reports kept track of things both mundane and monumental that happened on, or to, the ship, including narratives and data about attacks on Japanese vessels. Here is an entry from June 9, 1944, for USS Harder’s (SS257) fifth war patrol:

In the digital age it’s no longer necessary to travel to College Park to review these reports. Since 2009 all them—totaling some 63,000 pages—have been available online through the Historical Naval Ships Association website.

 

On the Patrol Reports page scroll down to the boat you’re looking for and left click. This brings up the file of all the patrol reports, special mission reports, and appendices available for that sub. In the case of USS Harder, that’s 325 pages of material covering six war patrols. The file will open at issuu.com, and you’ll need to use Issuu’s interface to scroll page-by-page through the reports. I was unable to find a way to print directly from Issuu, but you can download a PDF and print from that (BTW—the PDF is much easier to navigate). 

In order to do the download you’ll need to create an Issuu account—it’s simple and it’s free.

Once you’ve done that and you’re on the file’s start page, cursor down to the double-diagonal-arrow box to the right of the Facebook logo. Click on that and it brings up a full page view. Then, up toward the top right you’ll see another box with a page/arrow icon. Click on that and it brings up a menu of choices. Then click “download” and you can grab your PDF, either opening it or saving it.

Here’s another page from the Harder file, this one is a table outlining a successful attack on an enemy destroyer:

HNSA also has an online collection of U.S. Navy operations manuals, mostly WWII era, classified by type of ship. There are about thirty-three, including a fascinating German U-Boat commander’s handbook from 1943.

On another page are a series of sounds and videos , mainly of submarine operations. Here is a track of a submarine diving: 

http://hnsa.org/sound/soundinthesea/track21.mp3

 

In time, there will be a lot more digital material available online. Check back with these sources frequently. And, as they say to a departing boat: “Good luck and good hunting.”

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog. 

Disclaimer: The description of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.

P.S. - USS Harder was lost on her sixth patrol, in August 1944.