Database of papers

[pbinkley]

Since we first talked about a history of the Access Conference a
couple of years ago, I've wanted to put together a database of
presentations, tag them consistently, and then do some kind of
animated tag cloud to show how topics have come and gone over the
years. After this year's conference I'm thinking we could do this with
a Google Fusion table with fields like this:

Year
Author
Title
Abstract
Tags

With a comma-delimited list of tags in the last one. I'm assuming that
could be repurposed either within Google's environment or by exporting
to Processing or something to make something pretty cool.

We could divvy up the work by making a list of the years (for which we
have programs) and letting people claim the ones they want to handle.
It won't take much work to copy and paste from the program into the
fields. Then we fight it out over the tags, and work out the
visualization.

Does sound worth the effort? Any suggestions on improvements?

Peter

[Art W Rhyno]

> Does sound worth the effort? Any suggestions on improvements?

 

Sounds cool, Peter, a great way to try out Google Fusion.

 

art

[Nick Ruest]

I started a spreadsheet and shared it with the group based off of Peter's suggestions, and added a couple more columns. We should be able to pull this into fusion tables, or export it as a csv. I suppose this would be the most work intensive portion of the project; actually gathering the data. But, crowd-sourcing the copypasta should hopefully finish it quickly.

Have at it!

-nruest

[pbinkley]

Great stuff - thanks for getting it started. I'm still writing up my
conference experience but I'll dive in and start copying and pasting
when that is done. Paul Pival has just sent me a zip file of the site
for the 1997 conference in Calgary, which fills a gap. I'm thinking
we're going to need a conference history site where we can remount
offline sites like that (assuming Paul doesn't remount it at
ucalgary.ca), and ones we recover from the Wayback machine or
reconstruct from other sources if we can find any. (Gotta search
Google Groups - maybe the earlier ones posted their whole programs
somewhere).

I've put in boldface "[Entered in Spreadsheet]" flags in the main
conference listing for the two years that Nick and Kenton have
entered.

Peter

[pbinkley]

I've gone through the envelope of programs that Art sent me a couple
of years ago (thanks Art!), and found that an unlabelled three-page
set of notes therein is from 1994. The conference was called "Clients
and Servers: Information Access in the 1990s". There's a description
from a MUN newsletter that confirms the identification here:
http://www.mun.ca/gazette/1994-95/Sept.22/news/n16-www . So: we've got
all the programs in one form or another. Though there's still the 1993
conference in Winnipeg on publishing, which was linked from one of the
early Access programs as if it were in the Access series...

Peter