Introducing ‘Ring-tum Phi’ EXPOSED!

Our Ring-tum Phi EXPOSED! series at W&L Tall Tales digs into the official digital archive of the Washington & Lee University student newspaper, the Ring-tum Phi, to discover and document editorial coverage of issues and events of significant national or campus importance.

Each EXPOSED! article is presented in two parts;

• the original “text soup” edition — whereby we make visible the “full-text searchable” text layer taken from the PDF of the Ring-tum Phi issue published by the W&L University Archive, and
• our “ground truth” edition which includes full and accurate text with segments in logical reading order sufficient for use by researchers and historians, and to allow these documents to be more fully included in the ever-expanding global resource of Linked Open Data.

In addition to the companion editions published here on Medium, we produce an enhanced edition of the source Ring-tum Phi issue in PDF document format comparable to what the University archive publishes. These enhanced PDF files are freely available through a GitHub repository. We offer these files back to the W&L University Archives for possible release through the official Ring-tum Phi on-line collection.

We have two goals that will shape this collection of W&L Tall Tales stories:

• To showcase the disconnect between what is produced by the typical automated optical character recognition (OCR) or text-extraction process performed during bulk document scanning and digitization, and the popular and overly-generous belief that such extraction produces anything remotely close to what can be claimed as “full-text searchable,” and
• To identify select issues of the Ring-tum Phi to be given the extra effort of human-curated document layout recognition and text extraction — that is, our creation of the Ground Truth Editions— so these issues may be made more accessible to researchers and historians through the process of Linked Open Data publishing.

First up, the unique response of the Washington & Lee community to tragic events of May, 1970… our “Four Dead in Ohio” Moment. The Ground Truth Edition of How Gentlemen* Do Revolution includes the full and accurate text of the May 8th, 1970, Special Edition of the Ring-tum Phi.

To see what the “full text searchable” official release of this document looks like to a search engine or to a researcher’s Linked Open Data queries investigating a topic of interest, please see the ‘How Gentlemen* Do Revolution’ Text Soup Edition.