Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by Zirunel

Thanks. Yes that was my sense, that there are snippets but they would add up to the "Post-It Note of Ivory Bindings." Whereas a really worthwhile "companion-work" would require a dumpload of new ideas. Whether well-done or not, I suspect we're talking new content here

I'd have to say that we'd have to really get into the archives to really be able to tell. Phil was, it has to be admitted, not a very good 'housekeeper' with his files - that was my job, after all. What we we have to deal with is a huge mass of unindexed and unlabeled materials, some of it over sixty years old, and not written to any particular plan. Tekumel grew almost organically, and we wound up simply assigning 'find numbers' to everything in the collections and taking 'field notes' on what the item was and what is was about. My Missus then spent several years transferring everything into digital formats, as a lot of the hard copies were in pretty bad shape, what with water damage and such.

There is a lot of data; we have estimated over 28,000 page-equivalents worth. A lot of it is small, one to three page little 'monographs' that Phil did because he was interested in that subject at that moment in time and a lot of that is already up on DriveThruRPG for purchase. My job began and ended at the data collection and preservation - I'm an archivist, after all, and nothing more. What will happen to that data is not my province; I'm out of that side of the thing, and very glad to be out of it. It was a long, hard, expensive and quite thankless task that I put well over thirty years into.

So, can the book be written from Phil's fragments? Yes, but it's going to take a lot of work.

Originally Posted by Zirunel

And yes about the "very good writer." Ivory Bindings, or Crystal Bindings, whatever, would have to live up to Ebon Bindings or go down in flames. Especially if it was mostly new content and lacked the authority of received wisdom from the Professor, it would have to be better than good.

And Ebon Bindings is the Professor at his most immersive, erudite, and masterful. That would be a damn tough act to follow

Especially considering what source materials in his personal collection of Indo-Persian medieval manuscripts and Ancient Egyptian texts that he had. This was literally a university-quality library; the gentleman who eventually bought it donated it to found a university library - rather like with Phil and the Ames Library at the U of MN.

Originally Posted by Zirunel

Sounds like a major undertaking. Especially compared to reformatting (or just scanning) completed works.

Agreed! It took the Missus, assisted by Third and Fourth Daughters, the better part of two years just to copy / scan. It took another two years to do the same with what was in my personal collection, which covered a lot of the holes in Phil's where he hadn't gotten a copy of something over the years. At the moment, the digital version of the archive is up to somewhere around 62 to 64 Gigabytes of data. A big part of my work over the past four years has been to simply open a file, look at the text, and put it in a folder about that subject. (Basically the filing system used by Dr. R. V. Jones, in his work during WWII. Churchill liked it, and it does work.) Indexing will follow. I favor the Pitt-Rivers methodology, where everything pertaining to a subject is organized by that subject in chronological order. Yes, you do wind up with duplicate texts in different folders, but that is the way Phil worked.

Any suggestions?

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Agreed! It took the Missus, assisted by Third and Fourth Daughters, the better part of two years just to copy / scan. It took another two years to do the same with what was in my personal collection, which covered a lot of the holes in Phil's where he hadn't gotten a copy of something over the years. At the moment, the digital version of the archive is up to somewhere around 62 to 64 Gigabytes of data. A big part of my work over the past four years has been to simply open a file, look at the text, and put it in a folder about that subject. (Basically the filing system used by Dr. R. V. Jones, in his work during WWII. Churchill liked it, and it does work.) Indexing will follow. I favor the Pitt-Rivers methodology, where everything pertaining to a subject is organized by that subject in chronological order. Yes, you do wind up with duplicate texts in different folders, but that is the way Phil worked.

Any suggestions?

Given the scope you are describing, even the index would be intimidating. Are the files all in searchable formats? If they were all one one drive, could you just search the whole archive for "demon" for example?

Having asked that, it occurs to me that many of the files are probably image scans of handwritten text etc. and not searchable at all, is that so?

Originally Posted by Zirunel

No, not at all, that wasn't the comparison I meant to draw. What I meant was that compiling a new work like Ivory Bindings would be a major undertaking for the Foundation, considering that until now they have played it safe and limited their ambitions to marketing reformats or scans of the Professor's own finished works.

Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, I agree. And I would have to say that I am not surprised by this; their constant complaint to me during the year I was under contract to them was about how much work it all was - Tekumel was going to have to be somebody's full-time job, and they just could not see how I managed it in the 1980s. Tekumel is going to be a heck of a lot of work to make useful: I'd been saying that for decades, and nobody wanted to believe me.

You managed it by 1) working your ass off and 2) being enthusiastic enough to get other people enthusiastic too, and they helped.

Originally Posted by Zirunel

Given the scope you are describing, even the index would be intimidating. Are the files all in searchable formats? If they were all one one drive, could you just search the whole archive for "demon" for example?

Having asked that, it occurs to me that many of the files are probably image scans of handwritten text etc. and not searchable at all, is that so?

Yes; a good friend who knows software has come up with a way to search the files. I am not a software expert; all I know is that when you ask the program for something, it tells you everything that Phil said or wrote on the subject. The big problem is the artwork; we have literally hundreds of pieces of art, all of which needs to be identified, sorted, and labelled. Think of it as being handed the Library of Congress, and told to come up with an index from scratch without knowing what a lot of the books actually are.

Yes, a lot of it are the notes and sketches that Phil did for me at the game table. (*) The rule was that I got a copy, and he got the original. We also have a lot of unpublished stuff in hard copy form, like the 1987 'Who's Who' lists. It's doable; it's just going to take time and be - quite frankly - a labor of love.

(*) EDIT: I should have also said that this material includes photos, video tapes, and audio tapes as well. Sorry.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

You managed it by 1) working your ass off and 2) being enthusiastic enough to get other people enthusiastic too, and they helped.

True, true; remember how Phil used to call me 'the Tom Sawyer' of Tekumel? He never could understand the difference between working for someone, and working with someone. When you and I ventured forth to flog the merchandise, we had a lot of fun and some pretty good times; we all worked with each other, not for me. I don't think Phil ever understood that.