Touchstones

It would be nice if touchstones could pick up not just the 'majority' titles (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) but also alternatives/correct titles/original language/translations (Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis, for instance, or Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone). Those owning many non-English titles would be very grateful, I know.

I would like the touchstones to pick up the "correct" titles - sometimes they send me to the wrong book, which I find quite frustrating!

Overthemoon, unfortunately, I don't see how it's possible to always target the book you're looking for correctly - the first time. So far most of the choices have worked well for me, though - and usually I appreciate the fuzziness of it.

Hmm, yes - but I still think it's a bit strange that when I make a touchstone of Fussell's Abroad, it takes me to Pratchett's Witches Abroad!

Abroad by Paul Fussell? Fifth or sixth title on the 'others' list. You get a better result if you include any of the words in the subtitle, because that's the majority title right now.

aha, it works that way! thanks bopeep

The touchstones have one failing, and one failing that might be a feature.

The authentic failing is that it only queries the "works." That is, if A is combined with B and A has more copies, the title of the work is A and B goes away. The Latin version of Harry Potter should not IMHO be combined with the English, but the UK and US versions should be, and that means "HP and the Philosopher's Stone" loses. This is a failing, but it's not one taken lightly. There are about 1 million works, and 4.5 millions books. There are some ways to improve things, but for now it's a db speed issue.

The failing that might be a feature is the it weighs title similarity AND popularity. In the case of Abroad, the fact that the "work" title had more works (the subtitle) didn't help it, but the relative popularity was the killer. The goal is for it not to be pedantic. For example Harry Potter brings up a good guess--Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince--with a slew of good "others" to choose from. It COULD bring up the non-book "Harry Potter," entered manuall by someone. It doesn't because weighing title fidelity AND poularity, the system decided the popular was the better first guess.

Two questions:

Out of curiosity, what makes the Latin version differnet from say the Italian version? The combining page says "Foreign editions. The Italian and English-language editions of a book are the same work." I don't see that translation into a dead language confers special priviledges??

And speaking of priviledges, I see that I can post here without being a member . . . signs the guest book and moves on.

Bob

IMHO dead languages are different. The translation of HP into Italian is for the benefit of those who wish to read HP and do not read English but Italian. The Latin translation is for those who are quite capable of reading HP in their own language, but for some reason wish to do so in Latin (the same applies to Winnie Ille Pu). I suppose there might be an exception in the case of e.g. a Xhosa who also reads Latin, assuming HP hasn't been translated into Xhosa (I'm not sure about that), but such cases must be pretty rare.

The cast of mind of the first group is likely to be quite different to that of the second. The Italian will be primarily interested in the plot and so forth; the Latin reader on the fidelity of the translation and the wacky way that modern concepts have been dealt with.

The same can be said for anyone who reads a foreign language translation as an academic exercise. I've read the Harry Potter series in English, but I own it in Thai also, because it's an exercise in translation theory in itself, it improves my Thai, and I get to see how wacky British concepts have been dealt with. :P

Now that I'm married to someone who reads Thai natively, the book exists for dual purposes. Right now I've been reading HP book 2 aloud to my wife before bed, and as she's listening for entertainment and I'm reading for both entertainment and learning, we sometimes break into discussions about certain points of the translation--confusing word choice or a misunderstanding of the original wording by the translator, etc.

How is that so different from reading HP in Latin? I guess the answer is because I speak Thai at home, too. But it still strikes me as not so very different. :)

I guess because people who read the classical languages are snobs. They want Latin and Classical Greek to be special cases even though Latin (well Ecclesiastical Latin) is the official language of one state. I guess that artificial languages such as Klingon and Esperanto should be treated the same (at least according to franhigg's definition). The current guidelines also suggests that one should not combine a modern translation of Ovid or Homer (for example) with the versions in the original language.

The idea would seem to be that having the Italian version puts you in the same social "club" as having the English version, but having the Latin version puts you in a different one.

If there's a Xhosa version, WorldCat doesn't know about it. Only Afrikaans in sub-Saharan Africa. Here's a map.

Sorry. I should find an old explanation; I know I've gone into it at length.

The social system is about connecting people or not connecting them. Whether two books are one work is, on LibraryThing, a social question, with direct effects on how the site works.

The most important effects are:
(1) People who share books show up as sharing them when looking at the list of similar users.
(2) Shared books generate shared recommendations.

So, take two diametrically opposed examples:

(1) The Odyssey. If you combine the Greek and the English editions, you are not adding much to the English edition's community. The people who own the English edition now share a book with some classicist. Because the popularity is so different, there's no real effect on the English edition's recommendations. On the other side, the owner of the Greek edition now gets recommednations for the Crucible, the Bluest Eye and other books one reads in high school together with the Odyssey. In this case, the social different is significant, and the social effect of combination almost entirely negative.

(2) A Finnish edition of Harry Potter. If uncombined, the Finnish reader is restricted in talking only to other Finnish owners of HP. Since there aren't that many of those, the connections are pretty weak. The recommendations are similarly bad. You'd get Finnish books, but without much of an n, they'd be weak recommendations. But the Finn is not primarily interested in the Finnish-ness of the text, but in the underlying story. It's likely they'd like to be connected to other HP-fanatics, whether English, Dutch or Finnish. Combining them makes social sense.

That was quick. I should spend some time on this, but the basic principle is this:

Combination is about LibraryThing's social features will work. It isn't about truth, beauty, snobbery or vulgarity. LibraryThing can add features to nuance these issues, but on at least one level it has to be binary—does having book X connect you with someone who has book Y or not? That's not a cataloging question.

Incidentally, I think Esperato goes in with Latin, Greek, Classical Arabic and Reformed Egyptian. Combining them into the great Rowling mix would flatten the social scene and, I'm guessing, if you own HP in Esperanto you're at least as interested in Esperanto qua Esperanto as you are in Book 7 speculation.

Ecclesiastical Latin may well be the official language of a state, but it's a state with a birthrate of zero, where more than 90% of the employees speak Italian for everyday purposes. Latin isn't anyone's native language today, whether the classicists are 'being snobby' about it or not.

Those who choose to read Harry Potter or Winnie the Pooh in Latin are doing it for purposes quite distinct from your average Italian/Finn/Russian who wants to read the same books his peers in other countries are reading. Those who use Latin in their working life a) tend to read for pleasure in Italian or English, and b) aren't all that likely to be using children's literature for official purposes. I've got Harry Potter (and Winnie the Pooh, now I think of it) in both Latin and German, as well as English, and I think my reasons for owning them are quite different for each language. I'd combine the German and not the Latin.

This is why I've chafed against combining my language translations with their English originals from the beginning--I want to be part of a social club of people who read in Thai. :)

Ideally, combination would be personal-social, rather than social-social, like the choice of a soft drink, nor the choice of a president. That would be interesting to try...

Is there a way to pick up touchstones in the review field? Are there plans to add this feature?

I know that for my reviews, I fairly frequently reference other books (i.e. for Queen of Camelot: "Overall, not a bad retelling, but pick up Mists of Avalon first."), and I think it'd be nice to have the touchstones functional there as well.

I think allowing touchstones in reviews would be a good idea. My only qualm is that you can edit reviews on the edit page and even within the catalog. These are places where touchstones wouldn't work--there isn't enough room. I'm thinking therefore that it could be a sort of option--"advanced edit," or something. That would work on edit pages. I'm not sure there is a solution for catalog pages. People will expect to be able to edit reviews there, no matter whether they used touchstones.

So how about a button on the review part of the catalog page - "advanced edit" or "touchstone edit" or something that appears as an option when you double-click that field?

I think that's the answer. Probably a pop-up.

T

return of the dancing master/Danslärarens återkomst is an example of touchstones not working for books where the primary language isn't english, kinda annoying, partially as if I'm referring to that book I would be talking about the english language copy of that book not any other language. (If I could manage to read it in Swedish I'd be very proud and surprised!)

On the other hand I might want to boast about the fact that I'd finally finished harry potter agus an orcloc, I read it years ago in English as harry potter and the philosopher's stone but I would regard it as an achievement to read it in Irish! and I can't get a proper touchstone without using harry potter and the sorcerer's stone

I didn't feel like starting a new topic, since this existed.

Would it be possible for touchstones to...I'm not sure how to phrase it exactly, but to default to a single-word title if that's all that is in the brackets? I have recently tried to use the touchstone for such books as Sunshine by Robin McKinley, Earth by David Brin, and Lint (all single-word titles) and they aren't even available in all the "others" list.

(Ok, Lint is available, I hadn't looked hard enough. But it is frustrating that many books by Charles de Lint come before a book titled Lint.)

Sunshine and Earth used to both be available in the "others" list (even without clicking "show all 250"). Something changed within the last week.

Touchstones have been a bit finicky fairly recently - you get the right work with capitals sometimes but not without, ditto apostrophes. Earth is a book I'd love to touchstone in several coversations because it covers so many themes, but it just doesn't work.

Yeah, I've noticed. I've also noticed that if you post and touchstones won't load, often if you edit your post, then they will load. It doesn't change the fact that there is no option for the right books, though, sadly.

I'd also really like this to be fixed. The default should be the exact word or phrase that occurs in the touchstone, not any random popular work that happens to include that word.

I'm also having a lot of problems with touchstones just not loading recently. In one recent post, I only managed to get 2 of 10 touchstones. Maybe fiddling with capitals would have helped, but it's not reasonable to have to do that for 80% of the touchstones.

Yes, exactly, the default should be exactly what you typed. That's what's so frustrating, particularly with short titles, where there isn't anything you can add to it to make the touchstone find the right book.

yes agreed

I think it's much better now. I solved two problems, the Lint problem and the Hobbit problem. The former was described. The latter was when it gave you some other language of the Hobbit as the main title. The trick is getting it to work with Lint without making it work with the most obscure works. Sometimes someone will enter a sloppy work or author title that corresponds to a possible touchstone—Hobbit for example, or Nabokov. It needs to weigh the exact match against the almost exact match. It's never going to be perfect, but I think it's a lot better now. Report problems?

Well Earth by Brin is still taking an age to load.

While its thinking I'll try Food and Food: the definitive guide the first didn't find the second, but then I've a subtitle to help, unlike Earth that is still struggling. How about Spell Well! - that worked close enough. Poor old Earth is still lost though.

Right now it gives a work an extra push if it's exactly like it. So Lint is just "Lint." It does not give a boost if it starts that way. So Food fetches "Fast food nation" not "Food: The definitive guide." In this case, favoring "starers" would produce a better result, but I'm sure there are examples it wouldn't. Books starting with "the" are an obvious problem--you want "Lord of the Rings" to go to "The Lord of the Rings" not "Lord of the Rings: Extended edition," somebody's attempt to put a movie in. I could get the "the"s out, probably, but I think there are still examples where the "sloppy" name is not the start of it.

The Harry Potters, of course. Often people refer to them by as Order of the Phoenix. We don't want some minor mystery novel "Order of the Phoenix" winning out when someone types "Order of the Phoenix," do we?

#33
Why not? On a site dedicated to books, and the cataloging thereof, why should accuracy be penalized? If I put in an abbreviated form of a title, which turns out to be the full title of another book, I'd expect to have to scroll down to get a touchstone for what I didn't want to bother typing in full.

Most people discussing HP will probably put OotP anyway. :-)

Sunshine by Robin McKinley still doesn't show up, even on the extended list as far as I can tell.

Also, The Blue Sword, also by McKinley, keeps coming up red as though it doesn't exist.

#35
Hmmm. McKinley was combined with Robin McKinley. I just separated and "nevered" the combination, but touchstones doesn't seem to have caught up yet.

Someone may want to see if the works now under plain McKinley can be combined with others by ISBN.

The right touchstone for Twilight by Stephenie Meyer also doesn't seem to appear anywhere in the list of choices, though I can't say I looked carefully.

Zoe,

I can't find it. There are a couple of books with the name "Twilight" way, way down the list, buried among all of the ones which happen to have the word as part of the title or subtitle.

Seems crazy to me. Maybe we need some "Exact" or "Fuzzy search" boxes to check, here and elsewhere.

#38
Now that's a very good idea. Default to Exact, with a Fuzzy option available, if you can't quite remember/bother the precise title.

Earth is still lost.

Sunshine is fixed! The Blue Sword, also fixed! Beautiful! Earth is fixed, too! That makes all the ones I have been having trouble with recently fixed. Twilight isn't one I was trying for, but just to test it out, that's fixed too. Woohoo! :)

THis I have to check. earth
HEY IT WORKS!

Thanks to Tim and the "team" who've worked on this!

I can't seem to get a touchstone for Jeannette Haien's The All of It. Can the team take a look at that? Oh, NOW it's working. WOW. That's service! It wouldn't load yesterday, and I tried to edit it this morning on the 50 Book Challenge Group, and it wouldn't load there either. Let me go back and try again.

Edit: Well, I got that one to work, but seem to have lost all the other touchstones in that post.
Some kind of sluggishness is afoot.

http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=6326

> seem to have lost all the other touchstones in that post.

Quote Tim: " This is a known problem, and a nasty one."

And a hard one to solve, frankly. If the first-guess matches get better--which has happened,I think--it will be a smaller one.

Hmmm....yes. I see. G. W. Hawkes, despite the difference in first names/initials, triggers a John Hawkes. And I didn't change it again when I edited the post. BUT Jeannette Haien, and Playing Out of the Deep Woods come up right the first time, and those touchstones disappeared after I edited, too.
And I see that neither G. W. nor his work are "touched" in this post. He deserves better!

> and a hard one to solve

You could maybe put a note above or under the "Touchstones:" text next to the window where we type the messages.

(See idl.librarything.com for example:
"When editing a message in which you used a touchstone by choosing it from 'others', the touchstone jumps to the first proposition and has to be changed again to the correct author / title.")

I'd like to see touchstones - or at least some linking method, in the comments field for books. I often want to say things like, "this book is better than (other book)", or "this book is similar to (other book)", or "this book is a prequel/sequel or otherwise related to (other book)", and it seems to me touchstones would be an easy way to make these kinds of links.

Similarly, I'd like to see touchstones in Reviews.

I find using touchstones to be like dealing with someone who pays no attention to what you say, but seizes upon one word and goes off on a crazy tangent.

I can double-check to get the exact "work" title for a book, paste it in, and still have to go down to the 243rd choice on a bizarre list that includes titles containing one word of 6 that is the same.