{"id":3367,"date":"2017-07-26T12:01:15","date_gmt":"2017-07-26T16:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/?p=3367"},"modified":"2017-07-21T15:41:32","modified_gmt":"2017-07-21T19:41:32","slug":"50-years-of-gen-con-events-best50yearsingaming-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/2017\/07\/26\/50-years-of-gen-con-events-best50yearsingaming-com\/","title":{"rendered":"50 Years of Gen Con Events – best50yearsingaming.com"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Matt Shoemaker<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

I am happy to announce that the first and largest phase of the Gen Con 50th Anniversary Programs project is complete and publicly accessible!\u00a0 You can view the project here:\u00a0http:\/\/www.best50yearsingaming.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

This project consisted of 3 major components. \u00a01) The creation and cleaning of a data set containing the event information for the convention for all 50 of its years that is available for public use. 2) a public interface to the data set built in Blacklight for easy web browsing and searches and 3) an Omeka site to host historical information, oral histories, and digital scholarship results related to the data set.\u00a0 We plan to continue to work with this data for digital scholarship research in the DSC as well as use the data set in helping educate students in working with data.<\/p>\n

On\u00a0best50yearsingaming.com<\/a>, you can\u00a0explore the events<\/a>\u00a0of Gen Con’s present and past,\u00a0take a historical tour<\/a>\u00a0of the locations that have held Gen Con,\u00a0listen to or read interviews<\/a>\u00a0with Gen Con attendees, and\u00a0learn about the types of research<\/a>\u00a0that is conducted using this event information.<\/p>\n

Gen Con, originally a wargaming convention, \u00a0began in Malvern, PA when, in 1967, 3 gaming club members, Gary Gygax, Bill Speer and Scott Duncan (a Temple alumnus), decided to emulate sci-fi conventions only for gaming. The following year it moved to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and was named Gen Con as a play on its location and the\u00a0Geneva Convention Rules for Warfare. The convention has since grown considerably and is now the largest gaming convention in the world and a center for popular culture.\u00a0 More information can be found in our\u00a0brief history of Gen Con<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Creation of the data set was by far the largest component of this phase of the project. \u00a0First, programs had to be acquired. \u00a0A handful were available digitally but the majority were in physical format. \u00a0These were all completely scanned at 400dpi and the fed through ABBY Fine Reader OCR software. \u00a0Once we had the OCR the really time consuming part began, formatting the data into separate fields of CSV files. \u00a0Virtually every program was different, so DSC staff had to devise ways to most efficiently split the data into the 36 fields that made up our spreadsheets. \u00a0Sometimes this was using Open Refine, other times Excel, and sometimes just plain old cutting and pasting.<\/p>\n

Once we had all of that data formatted how we needed it we had it indexed into a Blacklight<\/a> site. \u00a0Blacklight is a discovery layer that allows you to quickly search through and facet different terms to find the information you need. \u00a0This will allow people to easily explore this data set and find some information to inform their questions.<\/p>\n

While all of this was going on we also built a companion site in Omeka<\/a> to provide a platform to post context about the data set, such as oral histories<\/a>, a timeline<\/a>, and basic history<\/a>, as well as somewhere to host any exhibits we wish to host to showcase the types of research<\/a> performed with this data. \u00a0 We hope this site will grow with the DSC’s own research using this data set and that of other people. \u00a0If you are interested in working with this data set or have ideas of what you would like to do with it let us know!<\/p>\n

This has been a great project for the DSC to work on in 2016\/2017 and I want to thank all of the DSC and library staff that helped make it possible:<\/p>\n

Program digitization and data clean-up:
\nJillian Benedict, Luling Huang, Kaelin Jewell, Emily Logan, Ritomaitree Sarkar, Gary Scales, Matt Shoemaker, Crystal Tatis<\/p>\n

Blacklight and Omeka systems work:
\nChad Nelson, Steven Ng<\/p>\n

Web design:
\nRachel Cox, Chris Doyle, Matt Shoemaker<\/p>\n

Editing:
\nJen Grayburn<\/p>\n

Omeka exhibitions:
\nMatt Shoemaker<\/p>\n

Principal Investigator:
\nMatt Shoemaker<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Matt Shoemaker<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2525,"featured_media":3368,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[187,170],"class_list":["post-3367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-grad-students","tag-gen-con","tag-omeka"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3367\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/tudsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}