User:Qq1122qq

Hello. /sandbox/ /notes/

=Works=

The Strand Magazine
I've been interested in digitising The Strand Magazine for literally decades, and some of the original PG Strand Magazine uploads were done from my scans. One of my early motivations in 'returning' to WS was in finally getting The Strand Magazine done 'properly'. It's a lot of work to crop and upload the images - for these I'm using the scans that I originally uploaded to IA more than 10 years ago!

One major admin effort with these is adding Contents Pages for each issue, as these are generally not included in scans (they would have been in the advertising section which is generally removed when the issues are bound into 6-monthly volumes). I've now added these for the first 10 volumes, using the information from http://www.philsp.com/homeville/fmi/k10/k10309.htm

Going further, I'm now also putting the information about the articles on the individual author pages. Currently all the information for the first 10 volumes is done - the aim is to get full contents pages for the first 20 volumes (everything from the 19th century).

Punch
I also find the WW1-era Punch magazines very interesting -- seeing how the comfortable pre-WW1 world was utterly changed in September 1914. The 1914 volume took a lot of work, some of it semi-automated, to fully transcribe, including cropping hundreds of images, and linking the index to all the articles and authors.

Popular Mechanics
I recently found that Popular Mechanics had a great archive of scans on IA, and have dived into the most recent copyright-free issues (from 1928 as of when this is written). All the 1928 issues have index pages. Often the 'behind the scenes' admin is just as time consuming as the proofreading with projects like this - most recently all of the named authors have been linked to their own WS pages.

All the authors now have links back to all the individual articles.

New York Times
My focus on this is getting a complete proofread/transcribe of some important historical dates, as well as getting the page structure organised. The page structure is now looking a lot better than it was when I first worked on it, although I'm still not sure what the point of a 'portal' is! At the main page now makes it possible for readers to browse through the large amount of articles that other people have proofread and transcribed.

Comptometer-Related Material
The manual of an early calculating machine, and the first one to gain widespead popularity. There are several editions, books of exercises, and both US and UK magazines from the 20s onwards. Initially found due to a reference in a jobs advert in the 1918 New York Times!

A surprisingly long lived quarterly news bulletin covering events in the lives of Comptometer operatives worldwide.

An illustrated book on the history of calculating machines from 1921. From Chicago so with a Compometer bias!

Other Material Being Worked On
The Annual Register is important work of British 'official history', including the founding of the 'Black Hole of Calcutta' mythos that lead to the British military focus on India in the 2nd half of the 18th century. Sadly it is in long-s and this still OCRs really badly. It also suffers from the 'sea of red' problem where someone has gone through and set every page as 'not proofread', which destroys my motivation! Some pages are half-proofread and have been for years, and at some point I might have to tackle them and redo them in my own style.

The Whetstone of Witte is the first English algebra textbook, and one that I have used material from for a long time. It's definitely worth transcribing, but has a few problems - if nothing else, the 'cossic' symbols are not in Unicode!

Other Completed Works
I worked on this as a 'palate cleanser' between harder projects. I processed as it was linked from the Author page for Dumas, who featured in several Strand Magazine issues.