Search and Display

[Lionel English]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 12:04 AM, Jan Roar Hansen <jan-...@online.no> wrote:

This is one way the "strip/feature index" will be helpful;
when indexing strip reprints in comic books.
We have a reprint format for nespaper strips and they should be linked to
this database.
It will then show in which newspaper, comic book or magazine a story has
been printed/reprinted.

This is how inducks has done it:
http://coa.inducks.org/story.php?c=ZM+012

 

Thanks for that example Jan.

 

This brings up a point I wanted to discuss anyway--how do we want to see search results?  We want  to have at least two levels of data--the strip overview data, and the daily/weekly detail.  But, a daily strip that runs five years will have over 1800 installments.  A strip that runs 14 years--and there are many of them--will have over 5000 installments.

 

So if I do a search on, say, Milt Caniff, what do I want to see?

 

I'd think the first thing I'd want to see was simply a list of the *different* strips he worked on, possibly with data ranges indicating his tenures on each strip.

 

If I click on one of those strips, what should I see?

 

What I would NOT want to see is a page after page listing of each of those thosands of installments.  Or even the hundreds/thousands of weeks.

 

I'm looking for alternative viewpoints here, but for my own part what I'd want to see would be, first, *if* the strip uses story arcs, a chronologically sorted list of story arcs from the strip (limited to the storys published during a creators tenure if I arrived at this list via a creator search rather than a straight strip search).  If there aren't any story arcs, then perhaps drilling down would produce a list of decades the strip ran (or the creators tenure ran), which could in turn be drilled down to a list of years, which could be drilled down to either months or weeks.  If there were story arcs, then drilling down into a story arc might also produce the list of weeks.  Drilling into a particular week would produce a list of the strip or strips from that week, each with details and reprint/collection links.

 

And while it should be possible to link individual strips to their reprints, it might also make sense to include reprint links elsewhere.  At the story arc level, for example, or even at the upper strip level (perhaps links at the top level to series that reprint the material).

 

What are other thoughts?  What are some things that would make this most useful to you from a user standpoint?  And from an indexing standpoint?

 

--
Lionel English

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

[Tony Rose]

I would expect to find decade groupings and then yearly groupings.

I don't know why yet, but I'm skittish about story arcs.  It may be that they are sometimes not very clearly defined.  I'm thinking of the soap opera strips where they often run like teevee soap operas with storylines evolving into other storylines over the course of several days.

I know that you said *if* there were storylines but as a user, I might be a bit perplexed if "Tarzan" and "Juliet Jones" didn't have a similar path for me to take to get to a particular strip.

I'm still musing.




tony

--
Group discussions are archived at
http://groups.google.com/group/gcd-strips/topics
 
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
gcd-strips+...@googlegroups.com
 
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/gcd-strips?hl=en

[Steve Cottle]

My questions are this,  are we just going to be gathering data,  are we not going to include images,  and or runs of the strips?   Are we doing this just to create a type of wiki/database for this material?   

-Steve

--
Group discussions are archived at
http://groups.google.com/group/gcd-strips/topics
 
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
gcd-strips+...@googlegroups.com
 
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/gcd-strips?hl=en

--

Mr. ilovecomix

http://ilovecomixarchive.com

http://ilovecomix.tumblr.com

http://twitter.com/ilovecomixarch

http://www.facebook.com/pages/ilovecomixarchive/111412535577659

http://123.writeboard.com/b7bbb1dc9bf249fc6/ password is ilovecomix
http://www.rackspacecloud.com/327.html (the best file hosting site ever)

[Lionel English]

This is actually an interesting question for the strip historians amongst us:  I know there are some strips, like Modesty Blaise and James Bond, which have very clearly defined arcs, down to little title card panels introducing each new story.  Other strips, like Little Orphan Annie, had story lines, but didn't do anything on panel to announce the end of one and the beginning of another.  In the latter case, how are arcs established (and named)?  Is is simply fan convention, or are there authorities available who can provide official names and start and end dates?

[Lionel English]

Images are a thorny question because of copyright concerns.  I suspect we can get away with representative panels, and perhaps with representative strips, but unless we're dealing with public domain strips I'm pretty sure a run of strips would be out of the question.  We're limited to what could be reasonably construed to be fair use.

 

Aside from images, we're seeking to create an extensive public archive of primary data.  So something like the IMDb of comic strips.  Or more appropriately like the GCD for comic strips (if you haven't seen our existing site poke around--http://www.comics.org/ .  With comic books we can capture cover images of each comic book, because the cover only represents about 5% of the total content, and we're using them at lower than print resolution).

[Tony Rose]

I wouldn't mind seeing a few images, to ID characters and such but newspaper strip owners (at least in the US) certainly seem to be considerably more jealous of their copyrights than comic book publishers.

tony
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Cottle" <ilove...@lilreader.com>
To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com

[Tony Rose]

For what it's worth, note that both of your examples of arc-titled strips are British.  Hmmmm.

tony
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lionel English" <lio...@beanmar.net>
To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2010 1:50:32 PM
Subject: Re: [gcd-strips] Search and Display

[Steve Cottle]

I run and host the www.ilovecomixarchive.com.   I do not see a problem scanning images from the paper and capturing the full Sunday pages.  I do not see how one could get in trouble since they are from the paper and not from books, or magazines.   My philosophy was always someone paid for the paper many many years ago,  so the creator and syndicate have been already paid for the hard work. I was also told this last week from Fedex/Kinkos that any thing they scan that is newsprint has to be 50 years or older for them to even touch it.   Also many like myself who collect digital scans, would gladly purchase reprint books if there were any.  

-Steve

[Lionel English]

Scanning images from your own personal copies of newspapers for your own personal use is certainly OK.  But the individual strips are still copyrighted, and as Tony indicated strip syndicates are less forgiving that some others about copyright violations.  If we were to put runs of a strip up on a public website, I would not at all be surprised to get a cease and desist letter.  So I'm not planning on telling the tech guys that we expect to see scans of each individual strip at the detail level.

[Tony Rose]

As I said, maybe some character IDs and perhaps a few panels to show an artistic progression for those strips for which the look changed a lot over time.  Some, like Dick Tracy or Little Orphan Annie -- lots and lots of character IDs but little artist progression; Gould and Grey started those strips with pretty mature styles.

But, Peanuts and Doonesbury both changed a lot as Shultz and Trudeau grew as artists.  Lots character IDs with Doonesbury; not so many with Peanuts (though still a lot more than, oh, say, Dennis the Menace).

tony
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lionel English" <lio...@beanmar.net>
To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2010 2:20:51 PM
Subject: Re: [gcd-strips] Search and Display

[Steve Cottle]

was not sure if this was something we were were planning on including in the project.  My main hobby is collecting digital images of strips. I personally think they should be preserved and save because the now comics suck balls.  And some of the wonderful masterpieces of the 20's century are very hard to find.

I am in the process of purchasing a wide format scanner to help the archive scan backlogs of Sundays we have acquired over the past 10 years,  I think the archive has over 400 pounds of Sundays to scan at this time from 4 different personal collections.   We try to purchase full page comics in bulk when at all possible.  

-Steve

[Mike]

comments interleaved

On Sep 15, 2:02 pm, Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net> wrote:

> This brings up a point I wanted to discuss anyway--how do we want to see
> search results?  We want  to have at least two levels of data--the strip
> overview data, and the daily/weekly detail.  But, a daily strip that runs
> five years will have over 1800 installments.  A strip that runs 14
> years--and there are many of them--will have over 5000 installments.

Yes, that's been my worry w/ this discussion. To take something from
the archival world, I would say you want a relational database with a
hierarchical organization like this. Note that not every part of the
hierarchy needs to be filled out for every example

Strip basic info
....series or story arcs (or perhaps by year ala 1939, 1940, 1941 as
the best granular level - ~50-75 entries for most comics)
........[perhaps put story arcs here as they may change creators]
............individual strips == x-ref or x-link to individual
newspapers

>
> So if I do a search on, say, Milt Caniff, what do I want to see?
>
> I'd think the first thing I'd want to see was simply a list of the
> *different* strips he worked on, possibly with data ranges indicating his
> tenures on each strip.

I concur.

>
> If I click on one of those strips, what should I see?
>
> What I would NOT want to see is a page after page listing of each of those
> thosands of installments.  Or even the hundreds/thousands of weeks.

I also concur

>
> I'm looking for alternative viewpoints here, but for my own part what I'd
> want to see would be, first, *if* the strip uses story arcs, a
> chronologically sorted list of story arcs from the strip (limited to the
> storys published during a creators tenure if I arrived at this list via a
> creator search rather than a straight strip search).

And I think I ended up in the same place as you, w/ a different
starting point. My scheme does work to organize 10,000s of photographs
btw.

Mike

[Mike]

Steve, that's such a wild misunderstanding of copyright and
trademarks, that I would advise you immediately to start reading up on
them.

On Sep 15, 3:12 pm, Steve Cottle <iloveco...@lilreader.com> wrote:
> I run and host thewww.ilovecomixarchive.com.   I do not see a problem

> scanning images from the paper and capturing the full Sunday pages.  I do
> not see how one could get in trouble since they are from the paper and not

> from books, or magazines.  cecloud.com/327.html(the best file hosting site ever)

[Donald Dale Milne]

Some ideas on what I would want to see upon a search, and I
discovered that it would vary depending on what I searched for.

If I search on a strip title, I would want to see information about
the strip, similar to the GCD's Series info: start and end dates,
original creators' names, syndicates that handled the strip, alternate
titles it is known by. I think I would also want to see a group of
buttons so I could select the next level of information I wanted to
see. These buttons might be to go to lists of all creators who worked
on the strip, a group of years (perhaps a decade each) listing of
strips, a list of newspapers that carried the strip, a list of
characters that appeared in the strip.

If I search on a creator name, I would want to see titles of all
strips he worked on. A group of buttons for the next level here might
lead to a list of a decade's worth of strips, syndicates he worked with,
and a list of known ghosts or assistants.

If I search on a newspaper name, I would want to see all strips it
carried, perhaps listed by dates. A group of buttons for the next level
here might lead to a list of a decade's worth of strips, and syndicates
that sold to the paper.

If I search on a syndicate name, I would want to see all strips it
distributed, perhaps listed by dates. A group of buttons for the next
level here might lead to newspapers it distributed to, and creators that
worked on its strips.

One might also want to search on a date or range (from a raw search
or using any of the date range buttons mentioned above) and find all the
strips names that were published on that date.

The third level, within a date range selection, would be a list of
all the relevant strips published on that date.

Once you had drilled down to a particular day's strip, I would want
to see information on the format, creators, characters, plot, story
title (if any), newspapers that carried it on that day, and known reprints.

Might be some other items I haven't thought of yet, but this
arrangement would get to everything rather quickly while avoiding
excessive lists of search results.

- Don Milne

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

[carch...@aol.com]

Perhaps limiting the number of strips to one per feature per year being repo'ed as representative examples might be a way to do it. And having them at 25% size for Sundays and 50 % size for dailies might be enough to get them into the "thumbnail" category.

 

my best

-Ray

[carch...@aol.com]

I like it.

 

my best

-ray

-----Original Message-----
From: Donald Dale Milne <dond...@att.net>
To: gcd-s...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Fri, Sep 17, 2010 8:09 pm
Subject: Re: [gcd-strips] Search and Display