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| Messages 1 - 19 of total 19 in this topic |
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Original Post - Jul 14, 2006 - 02:03am PT
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Nate D asked on the slab thread: "Ed - (our resident librarian), do you recall if Higgins ever wrote anything on the matter?
I don't recall, but thinking about how I would research it it occurs to me that a comprehensive index of climbing literature would be possible. At least US and UK literature (and maybe Canada). I have a complete index of Mountain, and of Climbing up to some date... there must be such indices for Summit, Ascent, Rock & Ice, etc...
Anyone out there ever put one together? steelmnky? looking sketchy there...?
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Jaybro
Social climber
The West
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Jul 14, 2006 - 02:15am PT
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There was a published Index of R & I, that came out, about '96. I'll comb the stacks,next time I get back to the ranch.
A Tangent
I've been rereading Games Climbers Play & Mirrors in the Cliffs, (great stuff!) but I still haven't found that Sheridan A, Sheep with learing climber, cartoon.
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Mungeclimber
Trad climber
one pass away from the big ditch
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Jul 14, 2006 - 02:15am PT
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AAC had library at one point, I would expect them to have a fairly serious biblography at the least if not a fairly comprehensive list.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 14, 2006 - 11:31am PT
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what I was thinking was essentially a single document which incorporated the indices of the climbing literature... I doubt such a thing exists unless someone needed it to do research.
maybe it would be possible with OCR and checking the various periodical indices, I know that many SuperTopians have complete or near complete copies of various magazines which probably span the range of climbing literature.
With such an index, even made useful for web browsing, questions like Nate D's could be answered easily, just pull up all the articles that Tom Higgins wrote and look at the titles... or make a quick perusal.
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Brian in SLC
Social climber
Salt Lake City, UT
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Jul 14, 2006 - 12:06pm PT
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Can't imagine the effort required...
Here's a link to Climbing's index:
http://www.climbing.com/print/index/
Kinda handy for older articles. Such as:
Tom Higgens: "Shake and Bake" on the Pinnacles. "Soarks" on the Flatirons. "Tricksters and Traditionalists".
Was a published index to Climbing, Rock and Ice, and Summit that came out a few years ago. Got a copy from Chessler, I seem to recall. Mighta been the same folk who did the index to Climbing. Limited number of years, but, also handy.
Climbing must be close to the longest running mag by now. Summit was 1955 and went to 1989, with sporadic quarterly after that? Climbing in 1970 on. 36+ year run.
I need Rock and Ice issues 2-5 and Climbing 7 and 9 if anyone has some they'd part with...
Cheers!
-Brian in SLC
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crotch
climber
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Jul 14, 2006 - 12:59pm PT
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Effort could be distributed if people volunteered to index 1 year for 1 periodical. Big project for 1 person though.
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BrentA
Gym climber
estes park
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Jul 14, 2006 - 12:59pm PT
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The index's name is Kelly Cordes.
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TradIsGood
Trad climber
Gunks end of country
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Jul 14, 2006 - 01:06pm PT
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Might be "technically" easier to just build a web site from scanned documents and throw a Google Search Appliance on as a front end.
Once you catch up with back issues, maintenance is easy "technically".
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steelmnkey
climber
Vision man...ya gotta have vision...
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Jul 14, 2006 - 04:24pm PT
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Not me baby, but I'd say with a pretty significant level of certainty that it would be homongously easier to create an index than scan the hundreds of back issues of all that gobbledygook. It would be a cool thing to be able to sort and search on, however. It took me on the order of 80 hours of effort to scan, edit, cleanup, and size all the covers for Climbing (see here: http://www.climbing.com/photo-video/gallery/coverarchive/);. Scanning entire mags would be a ton more work, even if you don't edit anything.
At one time, I was going to sit down and go through a bunch of stuff to add references for various info sources to the Yosemite routes database that Ed created, but time flies and all that. I still think that would be a worthy (and completely doable) project.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 14, 2006 - 06:08pm PT
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actually I thought that scanning the indices would be enough...
I am hoping that at some point scanning technology will advance enough so that scanning the magazines will be trivial, but that is yet to come.
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Nate D
climber
San Francisco
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Jul 15, 2006 - 01:49am PT
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Glad my question possibly triggered thinking in this direction - although the index would be quite an endeavor!
I'm reminded of Paul Friberg and Clint Cummings (sp?) ambitious searchable index of climbing guides (mini guides in magazines included). It is not updated and only dates back to 1977(I believe). If you haven't seen it, check it out:
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~paulf/paulf.climb.html
Hats off to the data-obsessed!
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fareastclimber
Trad climber
Hong Kong & Wales
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Jul 15, 2006 - 10:21am PT
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What about climbing literature from other countries in other languages? I've wondered for some time if there was a lot of Russian climbing literature, particularly instructional pieces. It would be interesting to see the variety of nationally accepted techniques.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 15, 2006 - 11:54am PT
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Yes, certainly the Russians, and the Japanese have many interesting reports. And as daunting as the english literature seems, it is probably not too much more daunting to include interntational journals written in other languages.
But you have to start somewhere...
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Jul 15, 2006 - 12:13pm PT
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Hey Ed H et al:
I'm looking at this great interview of Bridwell, done by John Long.
It is in Mountain 79.
I just scanned the 5 pages, and I'd love to share it.
After resizing, and scaling to 100KB, it is unreadable as a forum post.
Not surprising.
I'd guess it needs to be linked somehow.
LEB's ongoing interest in Yabo sort of brought this to mind, as Jaybro brought "The Bird" into the discussion. Nevermind Yabo for the moment: Bridwell's legacy really explains a lot and this interview pegs some critical features of our climbing synthesis.
I'll throw this up just for fun:
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 15, 2006 - 04:37pm PT
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probably the best thing to do is to use the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software that came with your scanner and convert the scans of the article into text. You have to check the text against the actual article as the OCR software is not bullet proof (I usually do this by having the computer read the file while I read along in the text, stopping and fixing the file as I hear disagreements with what I am reading.)
Then you have a text file of the article which you can post (beware of copyright issues).
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Jul 15, 2006 - 05:51pm PT
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thanks ed,
not sure i have ocr.
nevertheless, you perhaps highlighted a key aspect to the topic.
this being that it is one thing to index material, which risks no copyright infringement. it is quite another thing to retain and distribute or make available the actual content.
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Jaybro
Social climber
The West
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Jul 15, 2006 - 06:13pm PT
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LongAgo
Trad climber
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Jul 17, 2006 - 05:34pm PT
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I have recently gained permission from the Sierra Club and AAC to scan and post all my old climbing histories, articles, style rants, letters to editors and even old pics. Will have a web site up in a month or so for those who like to look back to such things.
I can say OCR scanning makes all this possible but not simple. Much checking and formatting is required. I figure as the world becomes more cyber and old magazines and journals fade away or get locked up in libraries, it's worthwhile putting stuff onto the web where readers and search robots can find it. Maybe other climbers will do the same in the future.
Happy reading!
Tom Higgins
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Jul 17, 2006 - 06:13pm PT
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That's Great!
Thanks Tom.
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