Zas678 he/him Posted February 17, 2012 Report Share Posted February 17, 2012 So for the past few years, Theoryland and 17th Shard have been making seperate reports, for seperate signings, with quite a bit of information being double covered. Theoryland decided that they were tired of making two separate databases, Terez's Interview Database, and my Brandonothology (which has always been fairly rough). So we worked together, transcribing interviews, collecting signing reports, and put it in a beautiful actual database, containing all of Brandon's and Robert Jordan's signings, reports, Q&As and interviews This thing- man, it's fantastic. It has searching (which is fast as lightning), tags for common subjects (from Atium to Brandon on Writing), and over 700 reports. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And the formatting is really nice, consistent, and I believe we plan on using this for years to come Marie and Terez from Theoryland have done an incredible amount of work, and have spent probably hundreds of hours on this project. They are amazing, and should be thanked for their hard work. Oh, I guess I should probably link you to it, huh? The Interview Database Note- Right now, it is mainly WoT, which makes sense since It's been around for 20 years, while Brandon's been around for only 10. Hopefully, with your guys' help, we can help tip the balance. Whenever you go to a signing or a Q&A, or find a video online that we don't have on here, post it in the Events, Signings, and Stalkings section of the forums. It's also still in Beta, so there are some bugs being worked out. But they're being worked on! And eventually, we hope to put more information on this, including better tags and all of Brandon's annotations. But go! Check it out! EDIT- If you have any comments on it, whether it's things you wish it had, or things that seem wrong, or any typos, let us know about them. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Windrunner he/him Posted February 17, 2012 Report Share Posted February 17, 2012 This database is awesome! The best part is the searching, way easier then clicking on the tabs of the Brandonothology, and hitting ctrl F on each individual section. Great job everyone, this database is definitely going to come in handy! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eerongal he/him Posted February 18, 2012 Report Share Posted February 18, 2012 So is this only temporary until brandon is done with WoT, or is a permanent thing and will keep track of brandon's signings forever, even after WoT? Because if it's temporary, then we probably want to do something for ourselves still.... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zas678 he/him Posted February 18, 2012 Author Report Share Posted February 18, 2012 I'm for keeping it. After all, in like a year or so, WoT is going to begin drying up, but there will still be this awesome thing to help source interviews. Chaos mentioned maybe when WoT is really dry, perhaps we could move it to 17th Shard, but keep a lot of the same things they already did with it. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eerongal he/him Posted February 18, 2012 Report Share Posted February 18, 2012 I'm for keeping it. After all, in like a year or so, WoT is going to begin drying up, but there will still be this awesome thing to help source interviews. Chaos mentioned maybe when WoT is really dry, perhaps we could move it to 17th Shard, but keep a lot of the same things they already did with it. That's honestly my only concern with us sort of "outsourcing" it is that when WoT inevitably dries up that it just kinda gets forgotten and we lose what advantages it brings to the table. I suppose it's something we'll deal with when it comes up. Other than that, it's pretty awesome. Edit: though, do we (anyone here, such as you or chaos) have at least read-only access directly to the DB? Because if so, it's easy enough for us to extract the data when and if it's needed later on. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Terez Posted February 18, 2012 Report Share Posted February 18, 2012 So is this only temporary until brandon is done with WoT, or is a permanent thing and will keep track of brandon's signings forever, even after WoT? As for our side of things, we plan to keep it up permanently, regardless of whether traffic on Theoryland dries up completely or not. I personally think it's a good idea to keep adding to the same database, since there will always be a certain amount of fan crossover, and it's next to impossible to really keep Brandon's WoT stuff separate from his non-WoT stuff, so there's no point in trying really. But if you guys would like to host your own WoT-free database one day you can of course feel free. The tags do a pretty good job of keeping it separate for now, and the search terms we use, of course. We need to figure out a way to label the Brandon tags. (It's not as easy as it looks.) For now, you just have to note that the alphabetical order starts over with the Brandon tags. And there's a lot of work that can be done to make those more useful. Right now we're very much beta-version on Brandon tags. (The WoT tags are much more thorough.) As for access to the database itself...even I don't have that! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eerongal he/him Posted February 18, 2012 Report Share Posted February 18, 2012 As for our side of things, we plan to keep it up permanently, regardless of whether traffic on Theoryland dries up completely or not. I personally think it's a good idea to keep adding to the same database, since there will always be a certain amount of fan crossover, and it's next to impossible to really keep Brandon's WoT stuff separate from his non-WoT stuff, so there's no point in trying really. But if you guys would like to host your own WoT-free database one day you can of course feel free. The tags do a pretty good job of keeping it separate for now, and the search terms we use, of course. We need to figure out a way to label the Brandon tags. (It's not as easy as it looks.) For now, you just have to note that the alphabetical order starts over with the Brandon tags. And there's a lot of work that can be done to make those more useful. Right now we're very much beta-version on Brandon tags. (The WoT tags are much more thorough.) As for access to the database itself...even I don't have that! That's good to know. Like i said, the only thing I'm concerned with relying on any site other than our own for anything is the long term accessibility or the ability to port it out in case it's ever needed. Though, i suppose, push comes to shove, it looks like it would probably be pretty easy to write a script that hashes through all the tags and extracts all the entries 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Terez Posted February 18, 2012 Report Share Posted February 18, 2012 (edited) That's good to know. Like i said, the only thing I'm concerned with relying on any site other than our own for anything is the long term accessibility or the ability to port it out in case it's ever needed. Yeah, I asked the boss about it, and he says he plans to address it in his will, lol. So I don't think you'll have to worry about that. Edited February 18, 2012 by Terez 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joe ST he/him Posted February 18, 2012 Report Share Posted February 18, 2012 AWESOME! what a brilliant data source, thank you so much One question, why can one not link to a tag? or a search result? or particular questions? is this kind of support planned? Also, I guess we're allowed to link to specific interviews/questions and copy for quoting purposes on our wikis and stuff? Thanks so much Terez and everyone else involved Joe 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zas678 he/him Posted February 18, 2012 Author Report Share Posted February 18, 2012 You actually can link to specific questions, which is something I didn't know until last night. For example, if I wanted to link to question 12 in the Alloy of Law Release (which is interview 689), I would just add a #12 to the end of it. http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=689#12 Search results you can't link to, unfortunately. And since the tags are based off of a search function, you can't link to those either. We're hoping to change the tag link though. We really want to make that happen. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joe ST he/him Posted February 18, 2012 Report Share Posted February 18, 2012 DOH, of course I should've thought of fragment links for particular questions, silly me (considering I think I advocated such a solution >.>) *technojargon* the quickest way of making linkable tags (searches would automatically benefit from this) would be to change the form method from POST to GET. (though I dont see why the tags/etc were made as forms rather than just hyperlinks in the first place...) Thanks again 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chaos he/him Posted February 19, 2012 Report Share Posted February 19, 2012 I'm okay with keeping it at Theoryland for as far as I can reasonably see in my mind. Both Matt and Terez have been super helpful on it. I suppose if we really had a desire to move it in a decade or two, we can figure it out. However, since it's coded by hand, there are technical difficulties involved. For at least the next five years, I'm very satisfied. Besides, we've always said we are the Theoryland for Brandon's stuff. This makes the connection even more obvious I really, really like the interview database. Terez and Theoryland have been amazing, and it's such an achievement. The most immediate benefit for us in the short term is the ability to link to individual entries. (Which means, Joe, that we need to make the Coppermind standard of citation.) But the searchability and everything... it's just so awesome. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Terez Posted February 26, 2012 Report Share Posted February 26, 2012 I'm so glad everyone likes it. There are really only a handful of people on both sides who are truly geeking out about it, but I expected that. Just be warned...if you're linking to individual questions on the Hero of Ages TWG thread in the Wiki, I might completely re-enter that report in order to make it one Q&A per entry, instead of one entry per person like it is now. I'll try to get that done soon so you don't have to change citations (assuming you haven't already started changing them). The links will change when I do that. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.