GCD Strip Requirements Doc

[shoeb...@gmail.com]

I've shared GCD Strip Requirements Doc

Message from shoeb...@gmail.com:

This is a draft of the requirements document for the proposed GCD Strip Database.  At your leisure, please review this draft and let me know where you think it needs work.  Any questions I can't answer I will bring back to the Strip working group.

Click to open:

• GCD Strip Requirements Doc

Google Docs makes it easy to create, store and share online documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

[Matt Gore]

Interesting document and I applaud the effort! An initial comment: the
Newspapers/Issues categories seem to me to have the potential to be a
quagmire. I could see the list of papers and issue ranges getting
pretty large for something like BLONDIE or PEANUTS.

Matt

[Lionel English]

Yes, any long running strip could have 10 to 20 thousand installments, most of which are likely to have run in hundreds of newspapers.  So we're looking at some very large data sets.

 

This was the prime motivation for this requirement:

 

"An important issue is search display--many/most strips will have thousands of installments.  So when returning search results, we want to see filtered/collated results that can be repeatedly drilled down to lowest details.

Example:  Searching on creator or syndicate or newspaper might produce list of strips, possibly with associated date ranges.  Clicking through a given strip might produce a list of years during which the strip ran (possibly limited by the original primary search--e.g. if we're looking at a strip via a creator search, we'd only want to see the years associated with that creator's tenure on the strip).  Clicking through a given year might produce a list of months or weeks during that year, and clicking through a given month or week might produce a listing of the individual strips for that month or week, with full details.  For a non-daily, there might be fewer click throughs to arrive at the details.  If the strip makes use of story arcs, then clicking through the strip name might produce a list of story arcs instead of a list of years, and those could be drilled down to weeks or individual dates.

Main idea here is we don't want to see a list of thousands of strip entries at a time, need to filter into manageable levels of detail.

--
GCD-Board mailing list - gcd-...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe send email to gcd-board+...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/gcd-board

--
Lionel English

San Diego, CA
lio...@beanmar.net

[Matt Gore]

Supposedly well over 2,000 newspapers carried Peanuts at its height
and while I think it could be interesting to catalog them how many
people would really care or use such data if it were compiled?

For my personal use I'm much more interested in story sequences.
Obviously, if you want to know when a particular Tarzan or Flash
Gordon or Terry and the Pirates story originally ran it isn't that
hard to find out. But, say you are looking for a specific Joe Palooka
story, SOL.

To what degree would we be reinventing the wheel? Has anybody got a
copy of "Syndicated Comic Strips and Artists 1924-1995: The Complete
Index" (1995) by Dave Strickler? I think it is still available from
the publisher. Guess I better find out.

Matt

[Henry Andrews]

You can't do data mining on a book. You might not care for analyzing the
distribution of a particular strip, but someone else would. "I don't see any
use for data X" is never a good reason to omit said data. And in any case, this
is not the forum to pick over the details, I don't think. Are we looking at
this with an eye towards ratifying the direction or is this simply an
informative step in the process?

thanks,
-henry

[Lionel English]

I'm looking at this as a document to be ratified by the board and tech team as sufficient to move forward, or as something to be sent back to the strip committee if there are shortcomings to be addressed.

[Lionel English]

But, I should add, that we should also look at the Who's Who and decide if we'd rather prioritize that, or do them in conjunction.  A creator table would be part of the strip project, so it might make sense to approach that somewhat simpler project first.  That's something I'd particularly like Henry's thoughts on.  Whatever makes the most sense from the tech team's perspective.

[Henry Andrews]

Henry is unlikely to be able to form a coherent technical thought until mid-January-ish at the earliest, aside from immediate necessary bugfixes :-)  Sorry, I'm declaring myself on post-release vacation-from-tech for a spell.

-henry

[Ray Bottorff Jr]

I think people would care as much as they care about syndicates and certainly would be of interest regionally for people wanting to remember when a certain strip appeared in their newspaper.

Thing is, recording this newspaper info allows multiple things not available in other indexes.

1) listing of newspaper variations of the strip (which format used, which strip title used for those who have alternates, what panels were dropped, what was cropped, et al)

2) listing of strips that some newspapers may have been censored and what was censored

3) listing of strips that may have been temporarily dropped by a newspaper on a given day, either deliberately or by accident.

4) listing of days when a strip may have been accident published out of sequence by a newspaper.

5) better accommodate international newspaper strips

6) It would make us completely different than the already complete strip databases done, especially the soon to be published Stripper's Guide by Allan Holtz

7) the number of newspapers that did comic strips are actually much more finite than the number of comic books that were published, and indexing the newspaper appears of a certain strip on a certain day gives us an index on the same scope and level as out comic book database.

my best

-Ray

-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Gore <matthew...@wku.edu>
To: gcd-board <gcd-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Mon, Dec 13, 2010 6:01 pm
Subject: [gcd-board] Re: GCD Strip Requirements Doc

Supposedly well over 2,000 newspapers carried Peanuts at its height
and while I think it could be interesting to catalog them how many
people would really care or use such data if it were compiled?

For my personal use I'm much more interested in story sequences.
Obviously, if you want to know when a particular Tarzan or Flash
Gordon or Terry and the Pirates story originally ran it isn't that
hard to find out. But, say you are looking for a specific Joe Palooka
story, SOL.

To what degree would we be reinventing the wheel? Has anybody got a
copy of "Syndicated Comic Strips and Artists 1924-1995: The Complete
Index" (1995) by Dave Strickler? I think it is still available from
the publisher. Guess I better find out.

Matt

-- 
GCD-Board mailing list - gcd-...@googlegroups.com

[Ray Bottorff Jr]

The number is smaller of newspapers than you may think, I believe, (certainly smaller than the number of publishers we have listed int he comic book side). And with drop down menus, once you add a newspaper name, you would not need to have to add it again.

I can take today's Detroit Free Press, index it, most of the strip names will already exist in the database, perhaps someone already indexed today's Chicago Tribune and therefore several of the strips for that day are already in the database. Add the few that are not. If set up right you can index a paper pretty fast.

That's how I am seeing it anyways. The actually functionality may vary when the time comes.

my best

-Ray

-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Gore <matthew...@wku.edu>
To: gcd-board <gcd-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Mon, Dec 13, 2010 1:05 pm
Subject: [gcd-board] Re: GCD Strip Requirements Doc

Interesting document and I applaud the effort! An initial comment: the
Newspapers/Issues categories seem to me to have the potential to be a
quagmire. I could see the list of papers and issue ranges getting
pretty large for something like BLONDIE or PEANUTS.

Matt

-- 
GCD-Board mailing list - gcd-...@googlegroups.com

[Donald Dale Milne]

If we are looking at priorities, I would recommend working on the
Who's Who project with an eye to creating proper creator records for the
GCD. Creator records have been mentioned many times as a significant
short-coming of our database: just today I received an off-list
communication from someone noting that problem again. Creation of such
a table(s) would also move us forward on creating character records, as
the formats are similar. Proper character records are something that
many fans would enjoy, including myself. Both of these sets of records
would also be useful in the proposed strip project, but the strip
project would add little, if anything, to our comics database.
Considering our incredibly small tech team, improving our existing data
system is preferable to taking on any new projects.

- Don

> <mailto:gcd-...@googlegroups.com>

> > To unsubscribe send email to
> gcd-board+...@googlegroups.com

> <mailto:gcd-board%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>

> > For more options, visit this group at
> http://groups.google.com/group/gcd-board
> >
>
> --
> GCD-Board mailing list - gcd-...@googlegroups.com

> <mailto:gcd-...@googlegroups.com>

> To unsubscribe send email to
> gcd-board+...@googlegroups.com

> <mailto:gcd-board%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>

> For more options, visit this group at
> http://groups.google.com/group/gcd-board
>
>
>
>
> --
> Lionel English
> San Diego, CA

> lio...@beanmar.net <mailto:lio...@beanmar.net>

>
>
>
>
> --
> Lionel English
> San Diego, CA

> lio...@beanmar.net <mailto:lio...@beanmar.net>

[Matt Gore]

I'm sorry, I've given the impression that I don't think specific
newspaper information should be indexed and that is not what I
intended. What I was trying to get across was my apparently poorly
stated opinion that Newspaper title and range information should be of
lesser importance than: 1) Strip Title; 2) Syndicate (which could be
an individual paper); 3) Story Installment; 4) Installment Creative;
5) Story Arc. From these things build the content of the DETROIT FREE
PRESS or the ABERDEEN AMERICAN NEWS (my childhood paper) or whatever
paper. While I do think that our intended patrons will occasionally
want to know what strips ran in a specific paper at a specific time, I
think they are much more likely to be looking for the story where Joe
Palooka fought Max Smelling or whatever.

Matt

[Matt Gore]

According to the Library of Congress, there have been about 200,000
different American newspapers cataloged by the American Newspaper
Project. (http://www.loc.gov/preserv/newspaperbrochure.html) Of
course, a number of them would have been born, existed, and died
before the days of comic strips.

Matt

[Lionel English]

I'm perfectly OK with shelving this till January.

You guys deserve a break!

[Ray Bottorff Jr]

The Who's Who will be a good place to start, but it will be missing most comic strip only creators and most international creators too. But its a fine place to begin.

 

my best

-Ray

[Ray Bottorff Jr]

I think we are thinking the same Matt, the idea is to build up the data of the strip info you mentioned to allow indexing of newspaper content. Yes, always the primary focus of data will be the strips themselves and the creators of course.

 

As Lional pointed out, the trick is to make sure the searches allow data to come in a usuable format and not one massisve data dump (unless that was the person intent).

 

my best

-ray

-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Gore <matthew...@wku.edu>
To: gcd-board <gcd-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tue, Dec 14, 2010 9:51 am
Subject: [gcd-board] Re: GCD Strip Requirements Doc

I'm sorry, I've given the impression that I don't think specific
newspaper information should be indexed and that is not what I
intended. What I was trying to get across was my apparently poorly
stated opinion that Newspaper title and range information should be of
lesser importance than: 1) Strip Title; 2) Syndicate (which could be
an individual paper); 3) Story Installment; 4) Installment Creative;
5) Story Arc. From these things build the content of the DETROIT FREE
PRESS or the ABERDEEN AMERICAN NEWS (my childhood paper) or whatever
paper. While I do think that our intended patrons will occasionally
want to know what strips ran in a specific paper at a specific time, I
think they are much more likely to be looking for the story where Joe
Palooka  fought Max Smelling or whatever.

Matt

-- 
GCD-Board mailing list - gcd-...@googlegroups.com

[Ray Bottorff Jr]

And sadly, more and more leaving the scene with their comics. The Newseum in Washington DC (great museum by the way) has a floor dedicated to the historical publications and historical headlines. At the end of the display is a rack containing one copy of every last printed newspaper in the United States over the previous year. There was a lot of them sadly, very big pile.

 

my best

-Ray

-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Gore <matthew...@wku.edu>
To: gcd-board <gcd-...@googlegroups.com>

[Tony Rose]

Peanuts only ran in about 2500 papers at its peak.  Of course, the list would probably be longer than that because of papers that signed off before the peak and those that signed on after it.




tony

----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Gore" <matthew...@wku.edu>
To: "gcd-board" <gcd-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, December 13, 2010 5:05:43 PM
Subject: [gcd-board] Re: GCD Strip Requirements Doc

[Tony Rose]

Of course, I'll defer on the tech questions, but to the layman -- me -- it seems that using the Who's Who to populate a creators table would be a pretty simple feat.

tony
----- Original Message -----

[Lionel English]

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:07 AM, Tony Rose <tonyr...@comcast.net> wrote:

Peanuts only ran in about 2500 papers at its peak.  Of course, the list would probably be longer than that because of papers that signed off before the peak and those that signed on after it.

 

 

So, running 365.25 days a year for 50 years, that would represent about 18,000 installments and 45 million records to record all the places where each installment of the strip was published.  Excluding reprint collections, of course :-)  And Blondie, of course, has been around for 80 years.  According to Wikipedia, it's carried in around 2000 papers, making for nearly 30,000 installments and 58 million publication records.  And those are hardly the only long running popular strips.

 

Which means it's a project unlikely to be taken up by anyone other than us--it's too big for individual researchers to tackle, despite the fact that the data would be a trove for researchers.  And it's a project that will require decades of ongoing effort, just like the comic book project.

 

However, I'm also thinking the Who's Who would be an easier project to tackle first, since we have the benefit of Jerry's decades of research to provide us with a very healthy seed, it's comparatively simpler, and it would be a component of the strip project anyway.

 

But Jochen is also chomping at the bits to do my.comics.org, which would have its own set of rewards.  So let's postpone this till after the holidays; let the tech team recharge; and then come back to this fresh and discuss where we want to put our energies in 2011 Q1.

 

 

From: "Matt Gore" <matthew...@wku.edu>

Interesting document and I applaud the effort! An initial comment: the
Newspapers/Issues categories seem to me to have the potential to be a
quagmire. I could see the list of papers and issue ranges getting
pretty large for something like BLONDIE or PEANUTS.

 

--
Lionel English

San Diego, CA
lio...@beanmar.net