Today was my first day being a "ground truther", whatever that means to HP Invent and Time Magazine. To me, we are simply editing every scanned issue of Time from the very first, 1923, up until 1985, into an electronic version for archival purposes. HP (yest the same one that makes your desktop, scanner, printer, what have you computer peripheral) created a program that takes scanned pages (HP scanners, no doubt) of the magazine and turns it into a massive database of information. Later, this will be converted, for translation to web.
This means my friends, that I get to sit through the decades of every Time magazine that was ever published, peruse its pages, grind out the truth and say that it's OK to convert the issue to database for upload to the web. Imagine the volume of words. Imagine all the articles I've seen just today. I went through 3 issues from the decade of the late 50's and about 4-5 from the early 60's. I saw articles on Magsaysay, the Lopezes, and a 1963 ad for Philippine Airlines as the gateway to the "Orient". We were quite the quaint country then, marketing our tribal offerings and the Banawe Rice Terraces. Very interesting indeed.
We're (about 90 of us invovled in the project) currently working out of HP's offices in west Jersey which is really their conference center (i.e. where a lot of their conferences, training and presentations take place). We took a tour this morning and I drooled over the RAIDs in the server room and the fantastic views out of the break rooms and cafeteria (sad to say, the food is terribly bland). Autumn should make the view even more gorgeous since we're in the middle of a forest of trees which will most likely be golden within the next few weeks.
More on the project later.
7:03 PM | |
