Parse errors

24. October 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Corrections, Item E, Updates

Creating the XML corpus required quite a bit of manual labor. Especially fiddly was subdividing the image files into individual glyphs. Obviously occasional errors happen. Cutting the svg images into their subparts, and then putting the correct ones back together again, and then making sure that each one has the correct number of images to match the number of glyphs and in the correct order.

So even though I did all of this over 10 years ago, and have checked through it in different ways many times, sometimes I still discover errors. Such as the example above on Keiti, recto, line 2. The first two glyphs were mis-parsed. That’s fixed now.

Change to Tablet D

22. October 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Corrections, Item D

Those who pay attention to the history of these items should know, Tablet D “Échancrée” was the first tablet that came to the outside world’s attention. When Bishop Jaussen became aware of this he tried to ask the Easter Islanders on Tahiti at the time to read it for him. When a volunteer named Metoro stepped forward, he revealed that the correct reading order for the tablets was to start at the edge closest to the reader, or the “bottom”, if one is treating the tablet like a page.

And generally researchers have taken great care to obey this order, and the lines in all of the corpus have been numbered in this fashion. However for tablets with even numbers of lines it can be quite tricky to determine which way is the “bottom”. And yet once this has been decided for the first side, the “bottom” edge for the second side will be the one closest to the “top” of the first.

Which makes it curious that Barthel did not observe the rule for this tablet. Horley reminds us of this fact and his work corrects the oversight. I am now following this, and have now corrected it in the corpus as well. So please be warned that the lines of Side b have now been renumbered, with Line 6 becoming Line 1, Line 5 becoming Line 2, and so forth.

Tiny Corpus Update

07. December 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Corrections, Item G

Some time ago I had noticed an error on Tablet G (“Small Santiago”), Verso, Line 1, where code “043t” was pointing to the wrong glyph. While this error was clearly mine, the seed for this error goes all the way back to Barthel himself. Barthel coded the preceding glyph combination as “33c.10f.76” when in fact it should have been “33c.10f.1.76″. At some point this got corrected to: “033c.010f.001” losing the “076” in the process. At any rate the “076” has now been restored and the “043t” code moved to the correct place.