What are we supposed to believe? We rely on technology: some more than others. We use it for its convenience and generally for its swiftness. No longer does one really have to remember on their own where we read something because we can keyword search, highlight, makes notes, and bookmark passages that we read.
Saturday night, while working on one of my papers for the Sylvia Plath 2012 Symposium, I tweeted that Sylvia Plath mentioned The New Yorker 58 times in her journals. I got this number by searching my Kindle for PC app on my computer. There were 61 results, but three of them were in the front matter (list of illustrations), notes, and the actual caption for the illustration. (Maybe I should add that I searched for the term in quotation marks; repeating the search just now without quotation marks I got 62.)
To my consternation, I woke up this morning to see that someone else found 63 results. Of course we all want to be right! I thought: How could this be? So, I searched my Kindle for PC app again. Still got the same number. In the age of computers and technology, redundancy is expected. So, I went to my Kindle app on my phone. This found 66. I did the math: 66-3=63. Happy? No, not happy. For although the number matches the the results of the other person who did the same search, I was still at a loss for how my Kindle for PC could have been so off: so wrong.
Some enterprising sneak put all the Journals on Twitter a while back (it wasn't me, I'm not that savvy). I went to this source next and got: 65 results. To make matters worse, there were only two non-Plath mentions to the New Yorker in this source, the list of illustrations for some reason not being included in that resource. Which is great, as that number then is still 63. I usually appreciate being corrected, but hate having to be corrected.
So, I decided to compare the Amazon Kindle app against the version the Twitter sneak put online. One of the differences is an instance where "New Yorker's" (with an 's following) was found in the Twitter one, but not the Kindle (but it was found on my phone!!). Another is where Plath writes "New Yorkerish" (again, found on my phone!). There were two where "New Yorker:" (with a colon following) weren't caught in the Kindle version (found on my phone...). And an instances where "New Yorker-" (with a dash/hyphen following) wasn't picked up (but it was on my phone). A lot of these instances were on the same page as other New Yorker mentions, could that have something to do with it?
If you just count the instances in the index to the print edition, you get 55. To make matters worse: Google Books yields (or yielded to me) 38 results, which included the instance in the index where the name appears; and using Amazon's "Search Inside" feature, I got 45 result. It is all over the map!
The moral of this beleaguered story-post is that is that Amazon Kindle version for PC, which I did really like before now, fails.
Saturday night, while working on one of my papers for the Sylvia Plath 2012 Symposium, I tweeted that Sylvia Plath mentioned The New Yorker 58 times in her journals. I got this number by searching my Kindle for PC app on my computer. There were 61 results, but three of them were in the front matter (list of illustrations), notes, and the actual caption for the illustration. (Maybe I should add that I searched for the term in quotation marks; repeating the search just now without quotation marks I got 62.)
To my consternation, I woke up this morning to see that someone else found 63 results. Of course we all want to be right! I thought: How could this be? So, I searched my Kindle for PC app again. Still got the same number. In the age of computers and technology, redundancy is expected. So, I went to my Kindle app on my phone. This found 66. I did the math: 66-3=63. Happy? No, not happy. For although the number matches the the results of the other person who did the same search, I was still at a loss for how my Kindle for PC could have been so off: so wrong.
So, I decided to compare the Amazon Kindle app against the version the Twitter sneak put online. One of the differences is an instance where "New Yorker's" (with an 's following) was found in the Twitter one, but not the Kindle (but it was found on my phone!!). Another is where Plath writes "New Yorkerish" (again, found on my phone!). There were two where "New Yorker:" (with a colon following) weren't caught in the Kindle version (found on my phone...). And an instances where "New Yorker-" (with a dash/hyphen following) wasn't picked up (but it was on my phone). A lot of these instances were on the same page as other New Yorker mentions, could that have something to do with it?
If you just count the instances in the index to the print edition, you get 55. To make matters worse: Google Books yields (or yielded to me) 38 results, which included the instance in the index where the name appears; and using Amazon's "Search Inside" feature, I got 45 result. It is all over the map!
The moral of this beleaguered story-post is that is that Amazon Kindle version for PC, which I did really like before now, fails.