A Digital Magazine Collection
Part 1: Intentions and Justifications
Did you know that there’s a thriving community devoted to the act of scanning and uploading decades-old magazines from the worlds of video games and computing?
They acquire piles of the things from auctions, car boot and yard sales, and donations, carefully remove the bindings, scan them page by page, clean up the images, and upload the results.
The community has been doing this for years, with tens of thousands of magazines — millions of pages — of output. And there’s still a lot of unscanned material, and new scans arrive virtually daily. (I have neither the equipment needed to join in this scanning effort, nor the patience. I’m very grateful for the people devoting so much time to it.)
Over the years I’ve downloaded a few issues here and there, but I want to get serious about collecting, and build a digital magazine collection that’s varied, structured, and searchable. Since I’ve seen no others doing this, and I’ll be figuring things out as I go, I’ll be documenting the process here on Medium.
But let’s back up a bit. Why is this worth spending time doing (let alone writing about)? Why do I want this?
In my spare time, I’m working on a series of videos that tell the stories behind notable computer games, creators, and hardware. (This summer, I released the second of these videos, about the first ten years of Bungie Software, and if that was an unsubtle plug, it won’t happen again, but it seems like an earned perk after eight months of working on it.)
When I’m writing the scripts for these videos, I need as much information as I can get from contemporary sources: news, reviews, interviews, etc. And when I’m producing them, I need to fill the screen with something. In both of these stages — pre-production and production — old magazines are one of the best resources available; they provide a view into the past that serves a crucial role in telling the story.
But your motive doesn’t have to be research to enjoy reading old magazines. They can be sources of entertainment and learning in and of themselves. Through the windows they open, you can see the world of modern computers take shape gradually, laugh with the benefit of hindsight at the many incorrect predictions and strange dead ends that led to the present, and ponder the many alternative futures that could have transpired if, at a divergence point, history had gone the other way. On a lazy Sunday afternoon, skim-reading these snapshots in time can give endless enjoyment.
Some would argue that downloading files from the Internet doesn’t make someone a collector. I really don’t mind; I’m calling it a collection in these articles for brevity more than anything. Shelves full of old magazines are wonderful, tactile pleasures — I have a few of my own — but I’d make the case even to the owners of extensive physical collections that there are some advantages to digital copies that shouldn’t be ignored.
For one thing, the only way to search a shelf full of paper is laboriously manual. In digital, it’s instantaneous (at least in theory; we’ll get to the complexities — and there are many — later).
Other advantages of digital over paper: posting an excerpt to the internet or using it in a project doesn’t require scanning or photography. Data doesn’t take up space and drives are cheaper than shelving. And your collection can be protected against disasters like fire or water damage. Good luck arranging an offsite backup for your set of Nintendo Power!
So that’s the case for digital. But if the files are already out there on the Internet, why go to the trouble of making local copies?
One reason is that you can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to get access to an online version when you need it. Many of these files are stored on file hosting services, and the lifespan of the average one of those is no better than most small rodents.
But the more important reason is that most of these digital magazines aren’t searchable in situ. We’re going to have to do some work to enable that, and having the magazines in a single location is a prerequisite.
Even once you have a big local archive of digitised magazines, it’s still laborious to find information relevant to something you’re looking for. Scanned images of the pages of magazines are really no more search-friendly than having the real thing on a bookcase.
The process of finding material about, for instance, a particular game, would have to go something like this:
- Find out when the game was released.
- Make an educated guess about the magazine titles that might have given the game the kind of coverage (e.g. news, preview, review, ad, postmortem) you’re looking for.
- Manually check the contents of those magazines around that time period (a few issues on either side).
It’s not that doing it this way isn’t fun. It can be! It’s slow, yes, but you often make serendipitous discoveries in the search, which can give inspiration or material for a different project. No, the bigger problem with this process is the high chance of missing out on something you’re looking for in the places you didn’t think to check. And what if you’re searching for something more open-ended, like the history of Electronic Arts, for instance? You’ve no chance of finding everything.
Where I want to get to — eventually, if it’s feasible, and I’ve no idea if it is — is to be able to search thousands of PDFs for a single search term, returning a list of results that shows every page in every magazine where those words are mentioned.
We have a long road ahead, and though I know the direction and some of the landmarks we need to pass, we don’t have a good map. There’s going to be guesswork, and I’ll probably get lost once or twice.
But the first thing we need to do, before we can do anything else, is to acquire at least a few magazine scans. And unless you’re going to be scanning those yourself (a process which is outside the scope of this series), that means downloading them from the internet.
So in the next article, let’s talk about where we can do that.
