Daniel M. Russell's Blog, page 18

Answer: Questions about bats--How many? Why do they hang upside down?

Bats are mysterious...

Greater mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis) P/C C. Robillier, from Wikimedia.
... creatures of the night, and you have to admit they have a real PR problem--vampires, high-pitched squeaky noises, their long association with dead things.

But they are fascinating, and these questions drove a lot of comments this week. Thanks for all the things you found and for sharing with the SRS community. (Who knew? South American bats that hibernate in snow banks? Amazing.)

This week's Challenge is another in our end of year series of Challenges that are not-too-hard-but-fun.

I've been curious about bats for a while and have always wondered a couple of things. Can we find the answers to these curious questions?

Here's what we asked and what we learned...

1. Why do bats hang upside down when they sleep? (It seems like a terrible idea to hang by your feet, so what drove them to adopt this unique sleeping posture?)

Fruit bat in tree in typical roosting posture. P/C OSHA.gov

One of the biggest changes to Google in the past few years has been the ability to handle questions in a natural language form. As longtime SRS readers will recall, once upon a time, you had to really think long and hard about what the exact search terms should be in order to elicit just the right response. Now, more often than not, you can just ask the question.

Knowing this, my first query was:

[ why does a bat hang upside down ]

That gives me some pretty decent results including a post at La Trobe University (Australia), and another at Mental Floss (a rewrite of a Quora post) telling us that it's simpler for a bat to start flying if it drops down from its heads-down roost and gets a bit of velocity just by letting go. This post also points to a longer, evolutionary story about why bats got to be that way. If you want the original reference, see: Fossil Evidence and the Origin of Bats in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution, Vol. 12, Nos. 1/2, June 2005. This paper points out that bats were originally gliding mammals (much like flying squirrels) that would hang from the underside of branches. You can see how that might easily turn into an overnight sleeping posture. And once you're sleeping upside down, the falling into the air trick is easy to evolve.

The original post also mentions some bats that sleep head-up, usually in leaves, where they have evolved octopus-like suckers on their feet to hold onto the leaves. And these bats typically sleep in a heads-up pose. So how do they get launched? They slide out of their leafy tube-houses and then fall to earth.

So, why do they sleep like that? Because it's simpler to become airborne!

2. I'm not really a bat-ologist (that is, a chiropterologist), but I've seen many different kinds of bat in my travels and that makes me wonder: Just how many different kinds of bat species are there?

Let's try that same approach (asking the obvious question):

[ how many different kinds of bat species are there ]

which gives a reasonably authoritative answer and a few good links.

The large answer (1,400 species) comes from the DOI.gov (US Department of the Interior) site, which is pretty authoritative. But... On the other hand, the text on that page is fairly informal and click-baity enough to give you pause, ("13 Awesome Facts About Bats..They’ve been called creepy, scary and spooky, but bats are an important species"). You're right to be a little skeptical about it. Note that all of the information on this page actually seems very accurate, but it's so informal that you'd want to double check it. What happens when you do that?

I opened up a bunch of other link in the top 10 results from my previous search, and found that they're all fairly similar. I kept reading that the estimate of species is always "more than 1,400" or "around 1,200." But I'd like to find a source with obvious credibility on the worldwide bat situation. (I mean, I believe the Department of Interior, but they might not count all of the bat species worldwide.)

So I re-did my query using more precise language:

[ species of Chiroptera ]

in the hopes of finding more scholastic and accurate results. Take a look at these results and check out where they're from:

The first result is from the AnimalDiversityWeb (which claims there are 925 bat species), the next is the Wikipedia article on bats claims over 1,400 bat species, but without any citation, while the Wikipedia article "List of bats" claims "estimated 1,300 species." Other hits include ScienceDirect (claims 986 bat species), BBC Science Focus ("more than 1,200), and the University of California Paleontology (UCMP) (claims "nearly 1,000 species"). That's a pretty big range of answers (from 925 - 1400)! How do we get some consensus?

Maybe we need some higher quality resources. Looking in Google Scholar for

[ chiroptera ]

I find a few hits:

Farina, Lisa L., and Julia S. Lankton. "Chiroptera." Pathology of Wildlife and Zoo Animals. Academic Press, 2018. 607-633. (in the text:"over 1300 identified", however, oddly, the abstract says "over 1200"... someone needs a proofreader).

Buckles, Elizabeth L. "Chiroptera (bats)" Fowler's Zoo and Wild Animal Medicine, Volume 8 (2015): 281. ("1240 species")

And so on. When I did a search for:

[ list of bat species ]

I found a book chapter which seems pretty definitive. Order Chiroptera, by Nancy Simmons, is in the book Mammal species of the world: a taxonomic and geographic reference 1 (2005): 312-529. This text, which many refer to as the master list of mammals, has a long list of bats (1,242 to be precise). It is the standard reference work in mammalogy giving descriptions and bibliographic data for the known species of mammals

There's a small problem: It's from 2005. And, as we know, species numbers change over time. Some of these are new species discovered in the last decade, but many were previously considered to be subspecies of other taxa. Species merge and split as we change what we consider a species. This isn't a sign of a problem, but rather an indication that we're learning more and more as time passes.

So I'm willing to settle for "more than 1,200" species, but I need a bit more data to go with the unfounded assertion that there are 1,400 species, as Google proudly proclaims (having extracted that number from the Dept. of Interior's bat page, which points to the Bat Week web page, which doesn't say where they got that number). Since that's unattributed, I feel better going with "more than 1,200" since I have a list of 1,242 bats by name!

3. We know many bats eat bugs, and some bats drink blood (vampire bats), and some eat fruit (fruit bats)... but what eats bats? Do they have any natural predators? (Let's exclude humans for the purposes of this discussion. As we know, humans will eat just about anything.)

For this I went with another question:

[ what eats bats ]

which takes us back to the Dept. of Interior page. That page in turn says "Bats have few natural predators — disease is one of the biggest threats. Owls, hawks and snakes eat bats, but that’s nothing compared to the millions of bats dying from white-nose syndrome." That sadly true, but our Challenge is about direct predation--what other animals eat bats?

Digging a little deeper into the SERP for this question and we'll that find minks, weasels and raccoons also eat bats. As with the previous Challenge, the question query format is good for a kind of surface level understanding of the question, but not the details.

How to dig deeper? Answer: By using a bit more precise language. What's a synonym for "something that eats another organism"? How about predation or predator?

Rephrase my query as:

[ bats predator ]

which quickly led me to an article titled Do predators influence the behaviour of bats? Lima, Steven L., and Joy M. O'Keefe. Biological Reviews 88.3 (2013): 626-644. (Unfortunately behind a paywall, but I was able to see it with my university login.)

In this article I learned that bats are eaten by all the creatures we saw above, but ALSO eaten by bat hawks (Macheiramphus alcinus) of the Old World tropics, and bat falcons (Falco rufigularis) of the New World tropics. Alligators also sometimes snatch bats from the air, and I also learned that "trawling bats" (that is, bats that fly very close to the water in search of stranded insects) are often captured by large fish and frogs!

Curious about this (a fish catching a bat?), I searched for a video with [ fish catching bat ] and found this one from NatGeo that shows both a bat catching a fish, and a fish catching a bat!

This made me wonder what other kinds of "X eats Y" kinds of bat-eating behaviors we could find. So my next query was:    [ "* eats bat" ]
where the asterisk (*) can stand in for one or a few words that precede eats bat.
After I ran this query I learn that bats are also captured an consumed by spiders (Texas banana spider captures a bat in its web and eats it), centipedes (David Attenborough shows a Peruvian giant yellow-leg cave-dwelling centipede capturing and devouring a bat). And of course, cats and dogs (and humans!) capture and eat bats, although they're not major predators.
Once you know that other animals capture bats, you can do a more direct search for them (e.g., [ spider eats bat ]) and get even more articles to expand your range of bat-dining predators, including one article from LiveScience telling us that bat-eating spiders are everywhere!
So bat predators include hawks, falcons, owls, alligators, weasels, mink, snakes, fish, spiders, and centipedes! Who knew?

SearchResearch Lessons

So many things to point out this week.

1. Even simple questions might need careful clarification. You'd think "how many species of bats are there" would be pretty straightforward. But as we found out, the number varies by when you check your sources. Believe it or not, biologists are still finding new bat species and re-organizing the old ones. Species split ("oh look! we DNA-sequenced these bats and find that they're NOT the same!"), species merge ("oh look! these two bats that look different are really the same!"). My general advice: Look for a master list of species and count THAT. Biologists love to make taxonomic lists of things, and that's probably the best resource for such a question. Just realize the answer might change over time.

2. If you have a specific term (Chiroptera), use it. Your searches will be much more focused than simply using a word like "bat." One doesn't use specific language to sound academic or smart, but simply because it's more precise, meaning you won't have to look around through low-quality results.

3. Remember the fill-in-the-blank ( * ) operator. It's a great way to expand your searches and find additional items you seek.

Search on!

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Published on November 18, 2022 13:16

SearchResearch Challenge (11/9/22): Questions about bats--How many? Why do they hang upside down?

A small bat flittered by me...

Greater mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis) P/C C. Robillier, from Wikimedia.
... early one summer evening a few weeks ago, flashing in a hinky-jinky flight path across the blueing sky. Bats have always been creatures of wonder and mystery so they're a natural fit for this week's SRS Challenge.

I didn't get a decent image of the bat I saw (or more properly--barely perceived, it was so fast and dark). I'm 99% sure it was a Little Brown Bat (Myotis, spp.), but, as usual, that got me to thinking about bats...

This week's Challenge is another in our end of year series of Challenges that are not-too-hard-but-fun. I've been curious about bats for a while and have always wondered a couple of things. Can you find the answers to these curious questions?

1. Why do bats hang upside down when they sleep? (It seems like a terrible idea to hang by your feet, so what drove them to adopt this unique sleeping posture?)

Fruit bat in tree in typical roosting posture. P/C OSHA.gov

2. I'm not really a bat-ologist (that is, a chiropterologist), but I've seen many different kinds of bat in my travels and that makes me wonder: Just how many different kinds of bat species are there?

3. We know many bats eat bugs, and some bats drink blood (vampire bats), and some eat fruit (fruit bats)... but what eats bats? Do they have any natural predators? (Let's exclude humans for the purposes of this discussion. As we know, humans will eat just about anything.)

As usual, please let us know what you've discovered and HOW you found the answer to this week's Challenge.

(And yes, I know, I'm a week after Halloween. Things take time.)

Search on!

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Published on November 09, 2022 10:45

Answer: A missing building in the park?

This mysterious space in the park...

What was once here?

... is mysterious no more thanks to the remarkable SRS Regulars!

To remind you of the Challenge for this week... I was walking through a park in Berkeley (California) and happened upon an area at 37.885832, -122.261408 that was fairly blank. That's a puzzle, because so much of the surrounding area was clearly built-up. Since it was on an otherwise hilly area, it looked very much as if a building had been there at one time--but what? There were a few pieces of flat concrete that looked suspiciously like former building foundations, and even more mysteriously, there's a flagpole on the western edge of the flat spot.

In this case, the SRS Regulars came up with the answer... and more!

So this week, I'm just going to merge their comments together and add a little twist of my own at the end.

1. What was once at 37.885832, -122.261408? Can you figure out the story given just that lat/long and a keen desire to figure out the past? Was there a building there? If so, who built it and why?

Many readers figured this out rapidly. Remmij was first to post the answer--the blank spot is in the middle of Codornices Park, the site of a former clubhouse that was designed (and partly built) by the famous Californian architect, Bernard Maybeck. Although Remmij didn't give the path to the answer, I suspect it was very much like what Arthur Weiss wrote:

"[eventually by looking at the map I found multiple hits]... However things didn't quite fit - I couldn't add everything up. Eventually I found that the park was called Codornices Park (or Creek) and that there was a clubhouse there that had now gone. But the Wikipedia article {about Codornices creek} on this didn't mention the fire. I then tried [ "Codornices Park" History] Plus I looked at the map and the panorama images - that included the flag pole.

Eventually I found gold. I wanted to see if there was anything on the club house so searched for [ "Codornices Park" "club house" ] and this gave images.

So I looked at the images and found { this picture of the clubhouse } with both a history and pictures of the club house and what happened to it - it continued to exist to the 1970s (so nothing to do with the fire). The quirkyberkeley.com site describes the building including the flagpole - which was built in 1916 by the Codornices Club."

Naomi chimed in with her search path:

I went directly to the map to confirm the location, did a search for Codornices Park history, and after a few dead ends refined it to the slide history and came up with the link that gives the answer: http://quirkyberkeley.com/the-codornices-club-clubhouse/

That's a good strategy, and it's what I did--look at the map first, then look around for nearby place names to focus your search. In this case, the blank spot is clearly in Codornices Park, so I used that in all of my searches, and the concrete slide is really an unusual thing, so searching for that is sure to give good results as well.

2. The architect that that building is also the architect of a few other pieces nearby. Can you figure one that's closest to this spot?

Regular Reader Krossbow found the clubhouse, but also noticed it was designed by the famed California architect (and Berkeley resident) Bernard Maybeck. Krossbow writes:

Finding the name Bernard Maybeck, I did a search for

[list of bernard maybeck houses in berkeley]

First on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) was a list with addresses of his buildings from Noehill:Architects Bernard Maybeck (1862-1957)

Can I use Google Sheets to calculate the distance from Codornices Park?

Search for: [google sheets calculate distance between two addresses]

And learn that this is the Google Maps Formulas for Google Sheets.

Using a copy of his sheet, I copied the data from Noehill. Then cleaned up the data to create this sheet.

Sheet of Maybeck buildings:  Bernard Maybeck buildings Distance from Codornices Park

From that I see that there are two that are within a quarter mile of the park. The Rose Walk and the Senger House at 1321 Bay View Place.

In a brilliant move, Arthur then took Krossbow's dataset and made a Google Map of all the Maybeck buildings in California. (Here's that map with a few additions by me.)

The blue pin in the middle of the green area marking off Codornices park is the location of the clubhouse. In Arthur's sheet, you'll see that the distance is the same to both (0.2 miles). Interestingly, I knew about the Rose Walk (which is really a stairway designed by Maybeck), but not about the Bay View Place house.

SearchResearch Lessons

1. Take a quick look around for relevant information. In my case, I immediately went to Google Maps to find that the location was in Codornices Park, using that as a search term, it was fairly simple to find the clubhouse information. Noticing that there's a concrete slide there as well gives you additional high quality search terms.

2. Look one level deeper. Once I found that Bernard Maybeck was the designer, it was straightforward to do an image search and find that photo of him actually sawing a board while working on the clubhouse in 1916. Fascinating stuff!

3. Use Sheets to compute distances automatically. Follow Krossbow's lead--Google Sheets can compute remarkable things, IF you know that it's possible. Check out the formulas in each of the cells. Nice job!

4. MyMaps lets you visualize the spatial relationships. With input from Krossbow's sheet, Arthur created a map of ALL the Maybeck buildings in California, which implicitly gives the answer to our Challenge.

5. Get your spelling right!! When I first started this challenge, I wasted about 2 hours looking for Cordonices Park (note the extra R in the name--and I note that Naomi had the same spelling problem as I did.. the string "codor" isn't a common one in English, but "cord" is VERY common. The thing is, I found several articles with "Cordonices," so I thought everything was fine. Only after a while did I spot my error.

Of course, it doesn't help that one of the original maps of the place ALSO has a spelling error in it:

From USGS original map of Codornices creek, 1894 Note the spelling error.
For what it's worth, this is a pretty poor map--trust me, Codornices creek looks nothing like this.

6. Remember to check other resources. A quick search in YouTube showed me this video of the park. At 1:10 you can see the boy walk into the open space of the former clubhouse. (And at 1:29 you can see how the concrete slide works.

7. For historical content like this, be sure to check online newspapers. I used my account at Newspapers.com to look for [ "Codornices clubhouse" ] and found a large number of hits. Here are a few of the more interesting hits...

- 1915 - clubhouse built in 1914? "At Codornices Park in northeast Berkeley... a clubhouse has been built." (Was this a predecessor to the Maybeck clubhouse? It's possible.) - Oakland Tribune, January 22, 1915, page 62

- 1949 - Maybeck's Codornices Park clubhouse used for fraternity parties – Oakland Tribune, Feb 3, 1949, page 54

- 1956 – “Berkeley condemns Codornices Clubhouse” Oakland Tribune, Dec 27, 1956, page 8 “is now doomed for demolition as a hazardous structure” (earthquake hazard)

- 1964 - “clubhouse distinguished by its large stone fireplace and designed by the world-renowned architect Bernard Maybeck, who once was a member of Codornices” … “condemned as an earthquake hazard and will be torn down…”Oakland Tribune, March 24, 1964, page 26,

- 1981 SF Examiner, 19 April 1981  “residents are united in their eagerness to have it [the clubhouse] rehabilitated.” (Really? See the next item. A better reporter would have noticed that it wasn't there in 1981.)

- 1982 - SF Examiner 23 May 1982 – p 132 “Codornices clubhouse, which was demolished in 1973”

- 1987 - Codornices Clubhouse: Was made in 1916, then demolished in 1973 and “a flagpole and four stone benches mark the spot” where it was. A caretaker’s house was at the site until 1981, when it was destroyed in a fire.  SF Examiner, May 10, 1987, page 154.

Interestingly, I haven't been able to find any news coverage of the clubhouse opening or its demolition--both the beginning and the ending seem to have been left out of the story.

Search on!

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Published on November 04, 2022 15:50

SearchResearch Challenge (10/26/22): A missing building in the park?

Blank spaces on maps intrigue me,

What was once here?

.. as do blank spaces on the land. More than a few SRS Challenges have centered on attempting to find out what happened here--this week's is in that category--what happened here?

In this case, I was walking through a local park and happened upon an area (see the image above) at 37.885832, -122.261408 that was fairly blank. Since it was on an otherwise hilly area, it looked very much as if a building had been there at one time. There were a few pieces of flat concrete that looked suspiciously like former building foundations, and even more mysteriously, there's a flagpole on the western edge of the flat spot.

Well... huh. What's up? After a bit of SRS I found the answer AND another interesting story about the place. This leads to today's Challenges:

1. What was once at 37.885832, -122.261408? Can you figure out the story given just that lat/long and a keen desire to figure out the past? Was there a building there? If so, who built it and why?

2. The architect that that building is also the architect of a few other pieces nearby. Can you figure one that's closest to this spot?

As I mentioned last time, I'm deep in the middle of running my class at Stanford, so I'm going to keep the SRS Challenges on the interesting/fun but not-difficult side for the next 2 months. Hope you enjoy these just as much!

Search on!

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Published on October 26, 2022 09:47

Answer 2: Can you find characters from Moby Dick in other places?

Let's wrap this up...

Side comment: Why so long between posts? Answer: In addition to my regular gig at Google as a research scientist, I'm ALSO teaching a class at Stanford University on "Human-Computer Interaction & AI/ML" with my friend and colleague Peter Norvig (syllabus). It's a wonderful experience, but it's also taking a LOT of time. I always forget how much effort it takes to create a new university-level course from scratch, especially one that's full of content-rich lectures. Last week (and this week, to be honest) are very full of me writing the course, creating tests, making slides, and organizing the material. Well, it got busy last week, and as you'll see below, writing up the Wikidata method wasn't straightforward. Hope you'll bear with me for the next 7 weeks as we work through the course and write SRS posts. I think I'll make the next few posts somewhat simpler questions--still very fun--but they shouldn't take me as much time to write up the answer. The last day of the class is December 15th. I'll have more time to post more advanced Challenges after that.

As I mentioned last time, there are multiple ways to think about answering this question. Let me show you the Wikidata approach and then summarize.

Reminder: Our Challenge was...

1. Can you find a way to identify other major works of fiction (leaving out fan-fiction for the moment) in which the names of "Starbuck" and "Queequeg" appear (either independently or together)?

Last time we looked at using queries like: [ site:wikipedia.org "starbuck" -starbucks ] to search for all mentions of the word in ALL of Wikipedia. (Noting the use of the minus symbol to remove any mentions of that coffee company.)

My plan was to write up a long post here about how to use Wikidata to search the data underlying Wikipedia to find all mentions of Starbuck or Queequeg in any literary object (books, movies, cartoons, etc.).

So... I spent several hours learning the SPARQL query language for Wikidata and figuring out how to write those queries. Here's what they look like in the Wikidata SPARQL editor:

Yeah. In this example the term p:P1441 stands for "is present in work" and wd:Q3414055 stands for "Queequeg." Roughly, this query translates to "search for everything that has Queequeg present in the work."

You have to know that "in the work" means, specifically,

"this (fictional or fictionalized) entity or person appears in that work as part of the narration (use P2860 for works citing other works, P361/P1433 for works being part of other works, P1343 for entities described in non-fictional accounts)"

The SPARQL language is very powerful--you can ask nearly anything. If you'd like to learn more about it, here's the SPARQL tutorial that I used. Using this, you can ask questions like "Who are the grandchildren of Johann Sebastian Bach?" and get answers:

As it happens, I know (because I'm a fan of early music) that JS Bach had 4 grandchildren, not 3: Anna Philippiana Friederica Bach, Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach, Christina Luise Bach, and
Johann Sebastian Altnickol. A fact you can check in many ways, but notably by looking at the Wikipedia page about Bach's descendents. And this illustrates a problem with the Wikidata; it has entries for everything that's a first-class object (e.g., famous people), but not everything that's a piece of text in Wikipedia has an entry in Wikidata. Thus, if you run the SPARQL query for works that contain Queequeg, you'll get only "first-class items," such as well-known books, movies, etc... but not all of them. If a book has Queequeg as a character, but the Wikidata doesn't have an entry for Queequeg in that book, you won't find it.

That's not really surprising--every database has a coverage issue. (That is, the database contains only certain types and amounts of information, this is called coverage.) The coverage of Wikidata is less than the full-text of Wikipedia.

It took me a while to figure this out. I was hoping that Wikidata would be more extensive, and allow me to find new entities that simple text search would not--but it didn't work out that way.

And, in truth, it took me quite a while to learn how to use SPARQL. It's sufficiently complex that unless you're going to use it every day, it's probably not worth the time to learn it. (It's a great project, but not quite ready for the ordinary SRSer who just wants to look things up.)
SearchResearch Lessons
As I said last week,
1. When searching for literary resources, no single source is going to give us everything we want. For complex search tasks like this, the best you can do is to assemble data from multiple sources. It's going to be really really hard to get a complete list of all the uses of Starbuck or Queequeg in literary works with just a single search. The sources are too many, too diverse, and with very different interfaces. Just realize this when you set out on your journey. Some SRS Challenges are still really hard.
2. Use SITE: on Wikipedia. As a first repository of cultural knowledge, Wikipedia is pretty good. Just searching for your target on Wikipedia (using the MINUS operator judiciously as needed) can get you pretty far. In a previous post we found a LOT of hits this way.
3. Consider searching other special collections. Think about searching on Google Books (remembering that the Hathi Collection is mostly, but not quite the same as Google Books). Searching in Books will get you a bunch of additional hits, but also search in places with other cultural resources such as movies (IMBD to find "Age of Dragons" where Captain Ahab is in search of the Great White Dragon, with trusty Starbuck and Queequeg on hand in the crew) or recorded music (e.g. Spotify, to find the song Queequeg by Quarteto Minimo).

Search on!

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Published on October 19, 2022 10:37

Answer 1: Can you find characters from Moby Dick in other places?

Another way...

As I mentioned last time, there are multiple ways to think about answering this question. I'll give one way today, and then ANOTHER answer later this week. (I promise that next week we'll move to another Challenge.)

Reminder: Our Challenge was...

1. Can you find a way to identify other major works of fiction (leaving out fan-fiction for the moment) in which the names of "Starbuck" and "Queequeg" appear (either independently or together)?

Last time we showed how to use Wikipedia to find mentions of Starbuck or Queequeg by looking at the Wikidata entry for each entity.

Here's that page for the character Starbuck:

We noticed the right hand side is a column with all of the Wikipedia articles about Starbuck in different languages. But look at the Wikidata entry for Queequeg!

Note that there seem to be entries only in English and French (looking at the right hand column). BUT if you look at the main table (in the middle), you can see there are entries for English, Spanish, and NOT French. What gives?
In the previous post I asked the question for you to consider: Is there another way to identify the Wiki pages that DO mention Starbuck, rather than relying on Wikipedia's own search function?
Well, yes, of course there is, let's try it this way:
[ site:wikipedia.org "starbuck" -starbucks ]
Notice that this will search all of the Wikipedia languages. (To search just within the French Wikipedia, you'd search with:
[ site:fr.wikipedia.org "starbuck" -starbucks ]
If you search both the French and Spanish Wikipedias (es.wikipedia.org) you'll see that they both have multiple hits for the name Starbuck AND for the name Queequeg. For instance, both French and Spanish Wikipedias mention Queequeg in connection with the story La Grotte Gorgone (FR), aka La cueva oscura (ES), which is aka The Grim Grotto (EN) the eleventh book in the series The Disastrous Adventures of the Baudelaire Orphans by Lemony Snicket (aka A Series of Unfortunate Events). When I browsed through the list of hits, I also found another mention of Queequeg in Italian, etc etc.
Interesting that the Wikidata page on Queequeg doesn't cover all this. This tells us that the Wikidata might not be complete over the sweep of the Wikipedia landscape.
But the site:wikipedia.org should get most of the hits. The search page for this site: query should look like this:

This says there are about 498 results (although only 304 of them can be actually read). By clicking on each link and opening in parallel, it's pretty simple to quickly assess what each of these hits actually represents.
Quickly scanning the top 100 or so results leads me to this list. (I'm only looking for literary references and ignoring fascinating asides like the insect from Guinea, West Africa , Queequeg flavibasalis.)
In La Grotte Gorgone (French), Lemony Snicket book #11, Queequeg is a submarine.
The 2013 film "A Spell to Ward off the Darkness" features a Norwegian metal band named Queequeg.
In the television show, The X Files, the character Dana Scully has a dog named Queequeg.
Queequeg is the name of a shapeshifter, a kind of super-villian in the DC Comicbook universe who works with his buddy Ishmael. Strangely, both of them work for Tobias Whale...
A 1926 silent film gets the whole crew together for a slightly different telling of Moby-Dick, the Sea Beast. (Does this really count as a different work? Maybe. Unlike Moby-Dick, it has a happy ending.)
In 2011, a fantasy film, Age of the Dragons, has the crew chasing dragons on land. Queequeg is along for the ride with Danny Glover as Ahab.
And in 1977 the book Queequeg's Odyssey came out, telling the (true!) story of the trimaran named for the harpooner that was built in Illinois, floated to the ocean, and used to sail around
I could go on, but you see my point. A simple site: search on Wikipedia can reveal ALL of the pages that mention a given person's name.
My point: (and I do have one)
... is that no single source is going to give us everything we want in a single search. For complex search tasks like this, the best you can do is to assemble data from multiple sources. It's going to be really really hard to get a complete list of all the uses of Starbuck or Queequeg in literary works.
On Friday of this week I'll write one more post that pulls everything together along with a way to do a query of Wikidata using a tool that might surprise you.
Search on!

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Published on October 05, 2022 14:06

Hint 2: Can you find characters from Moby Dick in other places?

Let's think about this some more...

This is such a rich topic that I'm going to break my answer up into multiple posts. Here's the first with the simplest way to use Wikidata.

1. Can you find a way to identify other major works of fiction (leaving out fan-fiction for the moment) in which the names of "Starbuck" and "Queequeg" appear (either independently or together)?

As I mentioned, there's in an entire Wikidata collection underneath Wikipedia. Of course, the easiest way to get to the things we care about is by a direct query:

[ wikidata Starbuck -Starbucks ]

which gives 60 results in Wikidata that have different versions of the term "Starbuck." (Note that I used the minus operator, -Starbucks, to get rid of all the hits with "Starbucks" in the results.)

As you can see, there are a lot of results here for "Starbuck" as a place, a person's name, and so on. But the most interesting result here is the one that says "Wikipedia(20 entries)."

Here's that page:

One really interesting thing to notice is that on the right hand side is a column with all of the Wikipedia articles about Starbuck in different languages. It's pretty easy to open them ALL up in new tabs, and then translate the languages you don't speak. Here's what it looks like for Hebrew (which I do not speak/read).

When I did this I learned about the Starbuck Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell. How odd that it wasn't mentioned in the English version of the Wikipedia search OR the Wikidata for English. We'll come back to this question.
What else did I pick up from these Wikipedia pages in other languages?

English
Fictional charactersStarbuck, a character in the novel Moby-DickStarbuck, a character in Fire Bringer (a YA fantasy novel) Starbuck, a character in The Rainmaker (a play from 1954) by N. Richard Nash, later made into a movieStarbuck, a character in the 1956 film adaptation, The RainmakerStarbuck, a character in The Snow Queen by Joan D. VingeLieutenant Starbuck, a character in the 1978 Battlestar Galactica film and television seriesKara Thrace or "Starbuck", a character in the 2004 Battlestar Galactica television series (note that this is a DIFFERENT character from the 1978 series... should it really count?) Dana Scully, or "Starbuck" as she was nicknamed by her father, from The X-Files TV series
Film and television
Starbuck (film), a 2011 Canadian comedyJ.J. Starbuck, a US crime drama series from 1987
But as I looked through other languages, I found even more!
FrenchStarbuck, a Belgian comic series created by author Philippe Foerster Starbuck, a Canadian film ( 2011 ) directed by Ken Scott and starring Patrick Huard
Hebrew The Starbuck Chronicles - a series of historical novels by Bernard Cornwell
TurkishElon Cody Starbuck , character from Howard Chaykin's comic book Star ReachWalter F. Starbuck is a character in Kurt Vonnegut 's novel Jailbird
Obviously, I could do the same thing with the name Queequeg, but I'll leave that as an assignment for the reader. Can you find all of the other languages that mention Queequeg and then open all of those pages to scan for additional mentions in other works?
It's still troubling to me that the search box in Wikipedia seems to have missed some of the articles that contain the term ("Starbuck").
Question for you to consider: Is there another way to identify the Wiki pages that DO mention Starbuck, rather than relying on Wikipedia's own search function?
I'll write about that next time, and then finish up with a third post that summarizes everything into a grand finale!

Search on!

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Published on September 30, 2022 10:52

Hint 1: Can you find the characters from Moby Dick in other places?

Let's think about this...

I've been enjoying reading all of the comments on the post, watching as people try different search strategies to get at this question. (A general comment--they're mostly pretty good! Nice job, SRS-folk!)
But rather than just give you my approach immediately, I'd like to give you a pointer to what I did, and then see if we can collectively figure out how to use this alternative method.

I also realize that I was a bit ambiguous in the Challenge statement. As we've discussed, in everyday life, Research Questions (or, as we say Challenges) are often a bit underbaked and unclear.

This week I asked about characters with a distinctive names (to wit, Starbuck and Queequeg from Moby Dick by Herman Melville), and I asked "... how often these names from Moby Dick appear as characters in other works of fiction." Specifically:

1. Can you find a way to identify other major works of fiction (leaving out fan-fiction for the moment) in which the names of "Starbuck" and "Queequeg" appear (either independently or together)?

This is very much like a standard Library Reference Question (see this list for some actual reference questions that have been asked by library patrons). It's a bit, shall we say, "open ended."

There are several ambiguities here:

a. what languages are covered here? I realize that, implicitly, I meant English--but that's doing a disservice to the rest of the world. For all I know, Queequeg might be HUGE in German-speaking countries. Let's include all languages.

b. what counts as a "major work of fiction"? Again, I had meant to say "written works of fiction," but as SRS regulars point out, that leaves out a lot of content (esp. television, movies, etc.) So let's modify our Challenge to include "fiction in whatever medium that is larger than a niche publication." (I leave it to you to define niche.)

My approach to this question came from a realization when I was reading the Wikipedia entry about Queequeg. Two things caught my attention. First, was the section called "Cultural references" -- meaning, references to the topic (Queequeg) in other cultural uses.

That's one source of insights about "other works." Another is the purple box at the bottom of the Wiki page:

You can see a list of other works here as well. See, for instance, the book by Ray Bradbury, Green Shadows, White Whale, a book that gives a fictionalized version of his trip to Ireland. This book includes a few references to Queequeg, and counts as a major work. (Check out the Queequeg mentions on Google Books.)

But.. I realize that this is an automatically generated figure. THIS means that there's some database somewhere in Wiki-land that's creating the box table and its contents.

That's right! I recall that Wikipedia has an entire Wikidata underneath it.

I did a quick Command-F/Control-F for Wikidata on the page and was taken to a new land of discovery--the Wikidata! If you click on the Wikidata link you'll be taken to the Wikidata item for Queequeg!

There are new riches to be found here.
So I'm going to make a suggestion: Can you find additional references to the Moby Dick characters of Starbuck or Queequeg by using Wikidata?
Is such a thing even possible?
I'll make comments as the week passes by with additional hints and ideas.
Search on!

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Published on September 21, 2022 05:21

Hint: Can you find the characters from Moby Dick in other places?