Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2017 March 1

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March 1

Audiobook production

For a skilful out-loud reader, someone who makes comparatively few mistakes (for example, a television presenter who typically contributes to live broadcasts), how long does it typically take to record an audiobook of such-and-such a length? For example, if our skilful reader spends eight hours in the studio, reading from an average book, how much audio time would be recorded in an average shift? Nyttend (talk) 02:06, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

A simple search for 'audio book recording time' finds [1], [2] & [3] which say 2 hours for 1 hour of audio. Then there's [4] which says 1.5-2 hours for 1 hour of audio. While these sources don't specifically mention anything about the skill level, it's clear they're talking about professionals i.e. people who are skilled in the craft. There are a few sources like [5] which mentions 4-5 hours & [6] which mentions 6 hour, but these sources seem to be referring to freelancers doing most of the work themselves. Several of the other sources mention additional staff time required for editing which is in a similar range of person-hours. Note that at least two of the sources also suggest an 8 hour shift is unlikely. Nil Einne (talk) 04:08, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

In an era of text-to-speech technology, what keeps such jobs alive, may I ask? Eliyohub (talk) 05:07, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Eliyohub, I'm currently going through the Harry Potter series, courtesy of Jim Dale, after having gone through several of the Austen novels mechanically: download the Project Gutenberg plaintext, format the lines properly, put them into Microsoft Word, convert into a PDF, and use Acrobat Reader's read-aloud feature. I can testify to a massive difference: aside from Acrobat's numerous and jarring pronunciation mistakes (e.g. in Persuasion, the family homestead, "Kellynch Hall", is consistently read as "KELL-link", while Lady Catherine de Bourgh is "de Boer" with a stop at the end), it's much less pleasant because it's read mechanically, without any sense of realism, and all the characters have identical voices, while a human reading an audiobook can voice different characters in different manners. Plus, you have tones of voice; if I had Acrobat reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Hermione would use an identical tone of voice in the troll-in-toilets scene, in the scene where she scolds the boys for going to a duel, and in scenes where she's actually happy. Conversely, the human narrator can observe that these situations shouldn't all be read identically. Nil Einne, thanks for those sources (I looked around online, but I didn't find those for some reason), so it's good to see them. Nyttend (talk) 05:24, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your explanation, it does make good sense. The obvious disadvantage is that due to the enormous amount of labour involved in the "human" option, far fewer books can be made available?

Also, if you're OK with the book being read in a heavy Indian or other accent, I suppose the job could be outsourced? I'm sure you could find some Indian Harry Potter fan who would do the job cheaply, with his or her best attempt at intonation of the voices of the characters? Eliyohub (talk) 08:29, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Audiobooks are as much performances as spoken poetry, live comedy or acted plays. Sure, I could read a transcript of a George Carlin Grammy winning routine but listening to it will be a little more impressive. They also give out Grammys for spoken word and spoken word for children performances. The 2004 nominees for the children's category were Jim Broadbent reading Winnie-the-Pooh, Jim Dale reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Eric Idle reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Carl Reiner reading Tell Me a Scary Story but they all lost to Peter and the Wolf by the Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Sophia Loren and the Russian National Orchestra! I would prefer any of those to some cheap reader or computer-voice. Rmhermen (talk) 16:10, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

I realise that this is not directly relevant, but when I worked on the EXLIB project, I was told that Talking Books for blind people, as well as being read faster than normal audiobooks, were also read expressionlessly, and that this was how users preferred them. I haven't found a reference for this, however. (I haven't looked very hard). It seems to me that for this purpose, machine reading would be more useful (though the problem of mispronunciation would persist). --ColinFine (talk) 17:59, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Also of tangential interest: not all readers are paid or experienced. Projects such as Librivox recruit volunteers, many of them amateurs and all unpaid, to read books that are out of copyright. Here's one explanation of why people choose to give their time in this way. Wired has reported on "The Weird, Obsessive World of Free DIY Audiobooks":

LibriVox is like Audible, the audiobook service owned by Amazon, except that every book is made for free by volunteers, and every book was published before 1923. A legion of volunteer readers—from professional stage actors to people practicing reading English as a second language—patiently, and sometimes not so patiently, inch through thousands of texts, posting the end results for free. The most popular audiobooks on LibriVox— for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Moby-Dick, and Pride and Prejudice—have been downloaded or streamed more than 2 million times. Since LibriVox started in 2005, over 8,000 texts have been recorded, edited and posted to the site by over 6,000 readers. Other volunteers work on the editing of the audio files and checking for accuracy.

Carbon Caryatid (talk) 14:44, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

References

As Carbon suggested above, a factor in the manhours required to record a book is verification. When I considered becoming a volunteer to record technical textbooks for blind students, I was told that they always have one person record it and a different person verify it. I do not recall if the verifier sat there while the reader spoke, or if he listened to the recording later while looking at the book. I suspect it was the former, so errors could be promptly corrected in the main reader's voice. Right there, you have at least two hours per hour of output. Edison (talk) 20:32, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Mayors in Mexico

In the government of cities in Mexico at present, is there a difference between "Alcalde" (mayor) and "Presidente municipal" (municipal president)? For example, does the city of Guadalajara in 2017 have both a mayor and a municipal president in office, each with distinct roles? -- M2545 (talk) 09:35, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

It appears that Municipalities of Mexico are not equivalents to cities; a "municipality" seems more equivalent to a "county" in the U.S., so a "Presidente municipal" would be the equivalent of a County executive. However, saying that, it does not appear that Mexican cities have the equivalent of Mayors, that is Mexico doesn't have a special administrative organization for a city, as noted at Guadalajara#Politics, Guadalajara has a Municipal President just like any other municipality. Given that, it looks like Municipalities are more like communes of France or civil parishes in England. Mexico City appears to be a special case, see Mexico_City#Political_structure, and it is organized differently than other parts of the country. --Jayron32 16:27, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

In Britain, almost all cities are civil parishes. Most cities have the powers of a district council, and most districts consist of a number of civil parishes. The more important civil parishes within a district can have their parish council upgraded to town council and appoint a mayor although there is no corresponding upgrade in powers from those of a parish council. London has a mayor and each of its constituent 32 boroughs also has a mayor. The City of London has a Lord Mayor. Some areas have unitary government, which is to say they have the powers of both a district and a county (the county council normally supervises the districts within it). 92.19.171.188 (talk) 17:17, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! -- M2545 (talk) 08:14, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Signatures?

In The Gambler (novel), it states, "if he [Dostoyevsky] did not deliver a novel of 12 or more signatures by 1 November 1866, ..." Any idea what that means? The editor who wrote it is no longer active. Clarityfiend (talk) 09:49, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

A signature is a group of pages forming a section of a book, wikt:signature #5 and here. In this case is was sixteen pages.[7] Thincat (talk) 10:45, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

More specifically, a signature is formed of pages that are folded and stitched together. This is a quick and easy way of binding that signature, but it's limited to how many pages there can be in each one: a multiple of 4 and not too many. As books are longer than a signature can hold, most books need to be bound by making signatures, then binding these signatures into a block, then attaching a hard cover.

Signatures are apparent in old hardbacks - you can see their folds by looking at the top or bottom of the block, near the spine, or even their stitching down the centre of the signature. Signatures having a fixed number of pages is why older books often had blank sheets at the rear, or publishers sometimes used these as a free location for advertising. They also appear where older books had illustration plates grouped together, rather than printing them in-line on each page as for a modern 'picture book' (a technical bookbinding term, not simply a picture book). These groups of plates were printed by offset lithography rather than letterpress (as used for the body text) so were separate sheets: either bound as a whole signature, or placed as the central sheets inside a signature.

Cheap paperbacks - and many modern books - are perfect bound instead. The sheets are placed in a simple stack, then glued at the spine to make the block. No signatures. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:42, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Actually, such books also normally go through the signature stage, because it's a necessary consequence of printing the text of several (usually 32) pages on large sheets of paper (rather than on "page-sized" pieces) for reasons of economy; but rather than being sewn into a binding, the folded and assembled signatures are instead guillotined down the spine edge to remove all the folded edges so that the "perfect binding" method (essentially, dipping the cut edges into glue that dries to a flexible state) can be applied. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.12.75.147 (talk) 18:18, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Silly me. It's one of the entries in Signature (disambiguation). Thanks. Clarityfiend (talk) 12:40, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

No, it's not covered in WP as yet, we still need Signature (bookbinding). The brief note on the disambig page isn't accurate either. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:52, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Agree we need Signature (bookbinding) to exist. The disambig eventually leads me to Bookbinding#Terms_and_techniques which says, with reference "A signature, in the context of printed books, is a section that contains text. Though the term signature technically refers to the signature mark, traditionally a letter or number printed on the first leaf of a section in order to facilitate collation, the distinction is rarely made today.[31]"

Is that enough to start a stub? Can you clarify what is not accurate about the statement " a large sheet of paper printed with several pages, which, when folded, is intended to form four or more leaves in the finished book"? I have some guesses but if we can find one or two additional refs a stub should be easy enough to start. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:29, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

"Signature" is often used as a loose synonym of Gathering (bookbinding), about which we do have an article. I'm not sure that a separate article is needed. Deor (talk) 23:00, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Deor thanks, I guess I only knew of "signature" as a synonym for "gathering" or even "section". Shall we merge those articles as suggested in 2015, and maybe put the link to the resulting article on the signature DAB page? SemanticMantis (talk) 17:22, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, the Section article could reasonably be merged into the Gathering article. (I'm more familiar with descriptive bibliography, in which gathering is the usual term, than I am with bookbinding per se. I don't know whether section is more or less prevalent than gathering in that field.) With regard to Signature (disambiguation), I'd change the entry beginning "In bookbinding ..." to something like "An alternative name for a Gathering (bookbinding)" and also change the word signatures to gatherings in the "Signature mark" entry. Deor (talk) 20:58, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Incidentally, I've seen 20th century hardcover books where that "traditional" letter was visible in the finished book; I assume they were normally trimmed away. These were mysteries from the 1930s or so, from a British publisher, that I used to borrow from a university library. They would show the initials of the title, then the signature letter; for example, if the book was Sparkling Cyanide you would see "S.C.—B" on page 17, "S.C.—C" on page 33, "S.C.—D" on page 49, that sort of thing. (Assuming the first page was page 1 rather than page i.) --76.71.6.254 (talk) 21:29, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Go to https://books.google.com/books?id=FiJNAAAAYAAJ and check the bottoms of pages 37, 53, 69, and everything else at sixteen-page intervals. You'll see a little number that apparently indicates the signature number. I don't know why page 21 doesn't have such an indicator. Nyttend (talk) 21:59, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

The signature (or gathering) indications in modern books (they're visible in many Penguin paperbacks, for example) are present for the same reason that they have always been used—as a guide to assembling the parts of the book in the correct order before binding. In earlier days (for the most part) catchwords were used for this purpose. Deor (talk) 23:18, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Historical puns

Hello,

The following is from Les Miserables:

"The pun is the dung of the mind which soars. The jest falls, no matter where; and the mind after producing a piece of stupidity plunges into the azure depths. A whitish speck flattened against the rock does not prevent the condor from soaring aloft. Far be it from me to insult the pun! I honor it in proportion to its merits; nothing more. All the most august, the most sublime, the most charming of humanity, and perhaps outside of humanity, have made puns. Jesus Christ made a pun on St. Peter, Moses on Isaac, AEschylus on Polynices, Cleopatra on Octavius. And observe that Cleopatra’s pun preceded the battle of Actium, and that had it not been for it, no one would have remembered the city of Toryne, a Greek name which signifies a ladle."

I know of the puns that Jesus Christ and Cleopatra made, but what are those other historical puns that Victor Hugo refers to? 70.82.177.85 (talk) 23:06, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

I expect that the Mosaic reference is from the seventeenth chapter of Genesis. God told the childless couple of Abraham and Sarah, now 100 and 90 years old respectively, that she would conceive (the implication is that it was miraculous), and Abraham laughed at the idea (see 17:17). In response, God commanded them to name the boy "Isaac" (17:19, which is related to the term for laughter — the two have the same triliteral root. See commentaries on the right side of the 17:19 link for more information. Calling it a pun is a bit of a stretch, since many biblical figures' names reflected the circumstances of their birth. For example, see Genesis 30, which speaks of the births of some of Isaac's grandchildren; the footnotes explain the meanings of the names. Ancient Israel (and their ancestors, in this case) apparently didn't use a stock of names as we do; there's such a massive variety of names in the Hebrew Bible, tons of them with clear meanings, that it seems that names were more commonly picked for their meanings than in modern Western society. Nyttend (talk) 00:40, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

I'd disagree there. God's command is plainly meant to mock Abraham. Not every name would be a pun, but there's an element of humor and irony in God's command to name him Isaac. --Jayron32 00:46, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

True; this is different from other biblical accounts of parents being directed to choose a name (e.g. John the Baptist, Solomon, and Jesus), because in other cases God gave the name without apparent reference to a specific event, but need mocking wordplay be a pun? If so, yes it's definitely a pun; I just don't think that we have to classify it thus. Nyttend (talk) 00:55, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

To those who do not subscribe to the belief that 'God' actually existed and operated in the way the Biblical accounts describe, "meaningful" names that prefigure subsequent supposed events may suggest that the accounts were composed long afterwards and the individuals in question – or at least their attributed names – are mythical rather than historical. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.12.75.147 (talk) 12:29, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Irrelevant even if true. Even if you consider it a work of fiction, it doesn't mean that wordplay is not obvious. Examples of wordplay in Shakespeare are not invalid even if Shakespeare was writing fiction. --Jayron32 14:15, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Not at all irrelevant: it's a rational explanation of how these punning names came to be used, despite them apparently prefiguring future events. Also, I wouldn't classify biblical stories as "fiction" even if they are not literally true: when pious people write down orally transmitted folk myths, they generally believe them to be true, and they may indeed contain elements of truth. Compare, for example, the Iliad and Odyssey, which demonstrably contain some historical foundations even though names like "Odysseus" (and its variations) gave 'Homer' suspiciously wide latitude for punning. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.12.75.147 (talk) 18:37, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Sorry. I misinterpreted your response. I had thought you were saying that because the Bible was mythical rather than historical, it couldn't be a pun. Thanks for clarifying. --Jayron32 18:40, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

PS, obvious puns do appear in the Hebrew Bible. See the eleventh and twelfth verses of Jeremiah 1: The word of the Lord came to me: "What do you see, Jeremiah?" "I see the branch of an almond tree," I replied. The Lord said to me, "You have seen correctly, for I am watchingb to see that my word is fulfilled." Footnote says that "almond" and "watching" sound really similar. Also, see Micah 1, the latter half of which has a series of puns. Nyttend (talk) 00:44, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Another which I remember reading of many years ago, but for which I cannot now find corroboration, is supposedly that in Aramaic, the words for "word" and "lamb" are identical or nearly so – the frequency of the terms translated as "Word of God" and Lamb of God" would then suggest deliberate wordplay in the original accounts which may now be obscure. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.12.75.147 (talk) 18:37, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Here's a reference to the Toryne one, though I don't get it. Octavius is attacking Antony, and has occupied the town of Toryne. Antony is worried. "Cleopatra jested with his uneasiness: "What a misfortune," said she, "that Octavius should be sitting upon a dipper!" — in Greek Toryne means a dipper." [8] 184.147.120.176 (talk) 01:37, 2 March 2017 (UTC) Apologies, just realized you already knew that one.184.147.120.176 (talk) 01:49, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

And Polynices: “characters whose names are significant in their literal meanings are named after actions or states; for example... Polyneices is the cause of “much strife” in the Seven against Thebes” [9]. 184.147.120.176 (talk) 01:48, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! 70.82.177.85 (talk) 12:16, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Added to Toryne. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 15:13, 3 March 2017 (UTC)