Project Feedback: New Romance of the Three Kingdoms Online Novel?

[Hyper90]

A consideration...
American vs British English

KMA’s style guide has been to use American English (because that’s what I use and kiddo me founded the site) and, for written works contributed by authors, whatever style those authors used (with respect to their works and individual preferences). I’ve been pondering what to do with the novel as I have been working on it. I’m currently leaning to a default presentation of American English (aided with a check which seems to indicate that, unlike our rubbish units of measurement, American English is used most frequently online). But, that said, it also occurs to me it is not out of question that this, too, could be a presentation preference. And it may also make sense, when displaying the base edited C.H. Brewitt-Taylor work, British English may be used in honor of the source).

But I’m also curious what thoughts folks may have on this. I can see why strong opinions exist in units of measure—one system is objectively far superior to the other—but not sure what to expect here.

Personally it really doesn't matter to me if it is American vs British English, because both are still in English and universally digestible.

However, for units of measure i would suggest to use both, why struggle to choose one when we can be best of both worlds?

[James]

Found an epub of the 2002 edition and sent to your email

Sweet! Thanks! I’m checking it out shortly.

Personally it really doesn't matter to me if it is American vs British English, because both are still in English and universally digestible.
However, for units of measure i would suggest to use both, why struggle to choose one when we can be best of both worlds?

That’s pretty much where I’ve been landing on it.

I’ve been pondering the units of measure. It could be possible to write a script, for example, that finds something like "20 li" and either 1) creates a tooltip when hovered over which shows approximate conversions, or 2) which can actively seek out and replace such measures in the text with the unit of conversion specified by the reader. That could be fun. Especially for new readers, who won’t come into the novel with an real expectation of what "1 li" is, unless they catch the right footnote and remember what is said.

[Tarrot]

I'd say just go with what the book uses personally. One thing is, and I'm not 100% certain on this, but was there a standard of what a Li was, that could be directly compared to a meter/foot? In modern days we've got objects that are the definitive answer of how long something is, but did this exist back then, and persist to the present day for accurate comparisons? This is how we get things like Wu Tugu was 10 feet tall, which is either a great exaggeration or an incorrect value for Li to Foot being used.

In other media they used the units natural to the era and it works fine (Final Fantasy XIV using ilm and malm as units of length for example). The precise measurement is not needed, just that it is a unit of length and a higher number means more length. Plus, as in the Guan Yu/Wu Tugu examples, you don't get the odd thing that gets brought up when trying to do an accurate comparison, and we just know they're larger than other people of the era.

[DragonAtma]

The problem is that the size of chinese units varied from dynasty to dynasty; according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_(unit) the li was 415.8 meters during the Qin and Han dynasties, but during the Tang it was as low as 323 meters and during the Qing as high as 537–645 meters.

There have also been lazy/sloppy translaters; even though the chinese foot was around the size of a human foot (which, for the vast majority of people is less than twelve inches), every now and then someone would just change them to english feet, causing nearly all chinese people to (supposedly) be eight feet tall and change!

[TigerTally]

IIRC, there are mixed references to Han li and Ming/Qing li or other traditional Chinese length units in the novel. Maybe just add another tooltip showing the calculation result under different standards?

[Hyper90]

Since the Novel was written during the Ming dynasty. Can we use Ming's unit of measurement ?

Or we can compare both Han and Ming dynasty measurements, converted into modern lengths then we can judge which would be the more plausible reference.

If anyone has the time, just list All The Dynasties' measurements and converted to Modern measurements so we can pick.

[TigerTally]

Since the Novel was written during the Ming dynasty. Can we use Ming's unit of measurement ?

Or we can compare both Han and Ming dynasty measurements, converted into modern lengths then we can judge which would be the more plausible reference.

If anyone has the time, just list All The Dynasties' measurements and converted to Modern measurements so we can pick.

Authors in late imperial Chinese sometimes simply cited the same unit in historical records, without converting the figures according to contemporary measurement. For instance, historical Liu Bei was seven chi plus five cun 七尺五寸 in height according to SGZ, about 173.25cm in Han measurement, but he was also seven chi plus five cun in SGYY, which would be 255 to 266.25 cm in Ming and Qing measurements. Hence, it is impossible to apply an ocne-and-for-all solution, and every numeric reference should be determined case by case.

There should be similar example for geographic distance, but it would take me some time to dig it out.

[James]

Things are coming along nicely.

Officer Names
There’s just so much I can handle with programming and software that it makes sense, to me, to try and handle that in advance before pushing the project open. One of the biggest issues I have been encountering is the Wade-Giles to Pinyin conversion. I really didn’t want to dump the bulk of that on the community. I "wasted" a bit of time trying to normalize the Wade-Giles names to correct some OCR issues and some of the values in the novel proper, a number of which are incorrect or inconsistently accented.

And then there is the fuss of so many partial names used. For example, Which Zhang hung his head? Which Cao commanded? Easy enough for us to make sense of in context, but not so much for a program. Especially when that program is aware of a whole mess o' Caos. Originally I thought we might extend these names so the program can recognize them properly, but I think we may have a better solution.

Using data in the encyclopedia database, which includes all officers and the chapters in which they appear—and is rather close to complete—I was able to create a pretty stupid complex set of logic which can download all their name data and create a series of filters which starts with complete names and name combinations, weighted by how important that character is to the novel (defined by how many chapters they appear in). It also creates versions of their name with properly accented Wade-Giles and without some accents, and with wild-cards to deal with the difference between the likes of Ts'ao and Ts‘ao. And then, with additional logic which looks for proper name separation (to avoid mixing up with other proper nouns and language), runs through the whole routine and replaces names for the chapter loaded, using only officers who appear in the chapter. It looks like it is working extremely well, after some tuning.

What’s pretty cool is that I can probably reverse this to convert all names back into proper Wade-Giles. Along with all proper nouns once all of those details are properly documented. It makes me happy to solve a lot of this in advance.

Novel Project Preview

novel_temp.png (105 KiB) Viewed 109 times

This is a screenshot of what I’m using to preview and improve pre-processing code and routines. Not what it is planned to look like. Right now it is set to highlight recognized and properly completed quotes (inconsistent quotation usage is an issue) and to highlight officer names. And other various errors it picks up, of which there are none shown.

Proper Nouns
Proper nouns are still a bit of a challenge. I'm thinking, at this point, that I can probably write some additional code which scans through the document to find all other instances of Wade-Giles, with all officer names now protected, and scoops them all up into a haphazard proper nouns database. From there, incorrect entries, or entries which should not be tied to proper nouns, can be handled manually (simply by removing the [Proper Nouns] bracket marker). And, perhaps, with a tool, we can specify one proper noun to be a duplicate of another, merging them with the incorrect entry adopting the language of the correct one; change the proper noun tag, having it update automatically in the novel; and generally start with a lot of progress already made. Seems like it might make sense to have a large database to clean up and narrow down rather than no database to gradually and painstakingly build up.

I've been thinking of how to handle odd names for proper nouns. It seems like we would like to be able to specify one while not necessarily always using the same language in the novel. For example, Hsich‘uan seems to be frequently translated as “the [cardinal direction]” in colloquial language, and has overlap with Ssŭch‘uan. But it seems useful to maintain a relationship to the original term, which would allow it to be referenced with a tool-tip and additional information. So maybe we can end up with something like [Hechuan:alternative text] which allows association with the proper noun in the database but also display of any desired text.

Notes
It seems like most of the initial concerns can be covered with special handling of names and proper nouns. And most anything else introduced gradually after the project launches.

I've also been pondering how to handle notes. Maybe it makes sense to have the ability to leave community notes and individual notes. That way we can have novel notes which are generic and cover basic information shown in the novel, which anyone can edit and improve, but also the ability for someone to add their own personal note with a much more specific and individual reflection. This form of note should be more unique and would belong to and be attributed to the author.

Any thoughts?

[ZL181]

I feel like I'm messing a lot of context since I just got back but I just wanted to express my support for this project. We must strive to keep the Three Kingdoms novel on the internet.

[James]

I feel like I'm messing a lot of context since I just got back but I just wanted to express my support for this project. We must strive to keep the Three Kingdoms novel on the internet.

It does seem like a shame for the community to lose that. I’m kind of surprised threekingdoms.com went offline. Although I guess I can appreciate it on some level.

Hopefully there is enough interest in this for people to engage with it.