Welcome

[Lionel English]

Hello, and welcome to the GCD's Comic Strip list.

A couple of preliminary remarks:  First, big tip of the hat to Art Lortie, for extending the invitation to join this list to members of the strip community.  Second, please note that this group is set such that anyone can ask to join the list, only members of the list can post to the list, but the discussions are publicly viewable.  Bear that in mind if you have privacy concerns.  The purpose of that setting is so that members of the GCD's tech team and board can follow the discussions when they have time, and so that they can refer to specific discussions when they want to understand the context behind whatever conclusions we present them with.  More on that below.

I don't recognize everyone on the subscriber list, so I'll introduce myself briefly:  My name is Lionel English, and I'm currently the chair of the Grand Comics Database's board of directors.  I've been with the GCD (http://www.comics.org) for nearly 15 years.  I've been a comic book reader for about 35 years.  I do NOT, by any means, consider myself an expert on comic strips, though I followed a few regularly in the '80s and '90s (Bloom County, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes), and in the last 10 years or so I've begun to get into a lot of classic strip reprint collections (Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, Modesty Blaise).

If you aren't familiar with the GCD, you can get a sense of who we are by browsing http://docs.comics.org.  Briefly, we are a group of international volunteer indexers who have the somewhat grandiose goal of indexing ALL comic books.  We're incorporated as a non-profit, we're "owned" by our members, and we're "run" by a board of directors who are elected by the membership from the membership.  Board directors serve two year terms, with half the seats up for election each year.  Members earn the right to vote by virtue of their contributions to the project.  All members are volunteers--the website earns enough money to pay for the hosting costs; extra money goes into a reserve; admins and programmers contribute on the same volunteer basis as indexers.

There are a lot of other comics indexing projects out there.  Most of them have a more narrow focus than the GCD, and many of them excel within their given areas.  The things that make us a little different are our scope--we want our project to be truly international--and our profit motive--many other sites are commercial driven, and are often tied to another enterprise (such as a comic-book shop).  As we move into strips, we expect to find the same things--other people have done it before us, many of them excel within their given area of focus.  We want to open it up a bit, and build a truly international, community driven strip index.  We know we have a lot to learn.

So.  Why are we looking at comic strips?  The GCD's original charter specified a comic book focus.  But last year, our members approved a change to the charter that expanded our focus to comics in general.  To date, we haven't done anything with that expanded focus.  The proposed comic strip project would be the first major non-comic book project we would undertake.  We have several reasons for choosing strips as that first expansion project.

First is a long connection between the two mediums.  The earliest comic books were simply collections of strips, for the most part, and strip collections continue to be an active sub-domain of comic books.  So we'd like a way to link strip reprints with their sources (and the reciprocal ability to link any given strip with all of the collected reprints it appears in).

Second is a desire by the tech team to take a crack at a from-the-ground-up project that might give them some insights into problems they're currently facing on the comic book side.  The comic book database was originally designed to be shared between members easily.  It wasn't designed for the web, and it wasn't designed to be interactive.  It was designed to be shared as very simple data files that could be passed back and forth by people who didn't necessarily have any database background whatsoever.  So it wasn't originally normalized(*) well.  Or at all, actually.  Efforts to normalize it began several years after the fact, and about five or so years ago an effort was made to completely redesign the data structures into something that resembled a normalized relational database, since we had moved to an online presence at that point.  But that still left us with 10 years of legacy data in the old structure.

((*) Normalization refers to the process of gathering related data points into tables and then establishing relationships between the tables.  E.g. creator names, aliases, and birth and death dates might all be gathered into a creator table; strip name and various meta-details about a strip might be gathered into another table; details about papers that carry a strip might be gathered in a third table; etc.)

So the comic-book database has gone through some significant changes in the last year or so, and it still has a couple of big normalization challenges in front of it.  Notably creators and credits, and characters and character appearances.  Implementing that transformation will be challenging.  So a new project that shares some of those challenges gives and doesn't have any legacy data gives the tech team a different perspective on problems that need to be addressed in both projects.  The strip project will initially be developed independently of the comic-book database, but they will share a few key resources--most notably the tech team.  Over time, they will eventually overlap in a few other areas--as noted, we'll want to be able to link strips with reprint collections, we'll want to create a creator table that would be shared by both projects (and may well become a project unto itself), and we'll want to create a character table (presumably) that could be shared by both projects.  And, of course, there will be code shared between the projects, as there will be common data entry/maintenance/search and reporting tasks that will be the same or similar.

And a third reason to do strips is simply to bridge the strip and comic book communities  The GCD eventually wants to be a comprehensive resource for comics in all forms.  Comic strips and comic books are the two most prominent forms, but traditionally they've usually been studied and documented by different groups of people.  If this project is successful, comic book people could still choose to stay strictly on the comic book side of the project if they wanted, and comic strip people could spend all their time on the strip side, but there would also be opportunities for people who were focused more on specific creators or characters to take advantage of the bridges between the two projects.

So.  That was a somewhat long intro.  More to the point, what's the purpose of this list?

In its initial stage, this list will be used to come up with a requirements list for the tech team.  What do we want to see in a strip database?  What data do we wish to track?  What features do we want it to have?  What kind of things do we want end users to be able to search for and find?  What kind of things do we want contributors be able to contribute?

I think that initially there are at least two things we need to identify, and I think we can discuss them in parallel.

One:  What are the limits on the kinds of things we want in the database?  Obviously we'd include all the "classic" kind of newspaper strips:  Calvin and Hobbes, Modesty Blaise, Pogo, Peanuts, etc.  But what are the boundary cases?  Can the experienced strippers tell me if there are "normal" boundaries that specify what is and isn't a strip?  Do people view single panel strips like Dennis the Menace or The Far Side as strips?  What about single panel cartoons in, say, The New Yorker?  Editorial cartoons?  What about comics in magazines, like Goofus and Galant in Highlights, or Little Annie Fannie in Playboy?

Two:  What do we want to record about each strip?  What do we want to be able to search on?  What criteria do we have for a user interface?  A lot of this we can discuss without knowing the answer to question one:  there are certain common things we'll want no matter what we include.  Other things might depend on how we answer question one:  do we want various kinds of flags that indicate something about the strips origin or where or how it was published?

I think Art has already begun a thread related to question two above, and I encourage everyone to continue that discussion in that thread.  I will start a new thread momentarily with question one as its focus.  We can start new threads as needed.  If you have any overall questions about how the project will fit into the overall GCD project, or miscellaneous questions, feel free to post a follow up to this thread or begin a new one.

Please note that we do NOT need to delve into implementation questions.  We need to spell out what we want and need.  We'll then give that to the tech team, and they'll decide how to go about it.  They have their own discussion list (http://groups.google.com/group/gcd-tech), and I'll remind you about it when we get close to a hand off point, so that those of you with a technical bent can follow their discussions and join in if you want (it's set up exactly like this list).  They may come back to us with follow up questions, and then they may ask us to do beta testing when they have code ready.

I look forward to your thoughts.

--
Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net