The Catch
I recently acquired a set of juggling magazines from the 80s and 90s which inspired me to reassess the state of my collection.
Has anyone got a spare copy of The Catch, issue 13, from April-May 1995?
Would anyone like issues of The Catch, Kaskade or Juggler's World to fill gaps in their collections? I've got lots of spares.
Post a message here or email me on <my user name on this site>@juggler.net and we'll sort it out
Cheers
-Mike
Sadly I am also missing issue 13 of The Catch. If you spares of issues 5, 6, 19, 21, 22; I would be interested (was 24 the last issue or were there more after that?)
If you have spares and could bring them to Chocfest on Saturday, that would be neat.
Thanks
mike.armstrong - - Parent #
Hi Miark,
I'll bring copies of 5, 6, 19 and 21 on Saturday. There was no Catch 22 (for literary reasons) but there was a 23.5 - have you got that?
Cheers
-Mike
mike.armstrong - - Parent #
...I for for to say, yes, 24 was the last one
would you consider digitalising "the catch". the digitalised versions of kaskade and jugglersworld are a great source of inspiration and information and i believe for many of us a print magazine collection is not really an option. i know i would be a shitload of work but maybe if some "catch magazine owners" would collaborate it could be done
mike.armstrong - - Parent #
Watch this space!
https://online.fliphtml5.com/lsvq/djcl/ is a test that might whet your appetite...
Little Paul - - Parent #
Well done for getting started on something which we've talked about doing for over a decade.
Have you had any more thoughts about how to overcome the OCR problems? Last time we talked about it, I think we decided the easiest way to deal with the use-every-font-in-the-box design was to copy type all the articles (ignoring the adverts)
I ask mostly because I have a huge stack of other non-juggling documents which are proving difficult to OCR, and any ideas I can pinch to make them easier to deal with would be appreciated!
mike.armstrong - - Parent #
For the moment I've decided to ignore the OCR problem and just get something scanned and uploaded. Details have derailed this too many times before!
Little Paul - - Parent #
Jolly good!
https://booksorber.com/ might be worth a look as a quicker way to do bulk scanning of stuff; I've tried it with old children's books and it works pretty well for flattening things out, at least. (though for things where the entire page is coloured it can get confused by white balance, unless I'm missing something)
I think the best case scenario would be for the text to be recognised as text not an image of text, which would enable the text to be searched for specific words.
Little Paul - - Parent #
Unfortunately, given the design choices made by the catch the text is very difficult to extract automatically. This is the OCR problem I mentioned.
Feel free to experiment with different tools for doing so, if you find one which works great!
Otherwise, I think mikes approach of "worry about that bit later" is a wise one :)
Huh. Taking a look at the scanned version from above, they do not look insurmountable if there is good OCR software out there that can do OCR in a column. I have no idea if such things exist, or if I am just being naively optimistic.
But yes, just getting it scanned is an excellent step to be going on with. Well done, that man.
Little Paul - - Parent #
The thing that trips up every OCR approach I've tried so far is that in some issues every article is in a different font, some times multiple fonts in the same paragraph, with odd shaped columns that flow around a breakout quote...
However, if you've got access to OCR tooling that I don't (I've only got free stuff, iPhone apps and a really old version of acrobat), and are willing to try, please do so!
If you can report back with something that works I'd be extremely grateful as I have other documents that have so far evaded my attempts, and would be willing to spend money on the right tooling!
mike.armstrong - - Parent #
Unfortunately, given the design choices made by the catch the text is very difficult to extract automatically. This is the OCR problem I mentioned.
This with bells on. Which is why I've decided to 80/20 the hell out of it this time and just produce something.
It was a few years ago that I last looked into OCR software I couldn't find anything that was even remotely successful. Correcting dodgy OCR is considerably more time consuming than just typing up the article manually.
I got permission to type up a couple of articles from the Catch for the IJDb: The business of shows by Steve Rawlings & Juggling & Puppetry by the Parachute Theatre Company. Which is a start...
Mike Moore - - Parent #
Back in 2010 I had the job of translating physical paper from Russian to English. I didn't/don't know Russian, and the instructor's advice was to use Microsoft Word's insert->symbol to manually insert each character in this 10 page paper.
Took some doing, but I found a multi-language OCR program (free trial) that must have had an amazing success rate. When I put the file into google translate, I had a fully-English document, with the only mistakes being around specific jargon!
It was that day that OCR impressed me.
mike.armstrong - - Parent #
Thanks Dan, I'll have a look at this - though the scanning isn't the problem for this job. I can remove two staples and put them through the photocopiers at work; it's the OCR bit which proved problematic in the past
Tom Derrick - - Parent #
If it's not playing nicely with OCR and is publicly available, could the copy typing be outsourced to the wider community? I'm sure there are a few of us who could spend the odd half hour on an article, and would spread the burden somewhat.
mike.armstrong - - Parent #
Thanks folks, I'll get the basics done and up somewhere and then be I'll be in touch with the wider community about making it better
Richard Loxley - - Parent #
I have a spare copy of issue 9 (but without the cardboard unicycle cover bonus). That's because the unicycle was missing on my subscription copy, so Stuart gave me another copy that did have the unicycle.
For collectors, it's worth noting that issue 18 was confusingly numbered "Issue 1 Spring 1996 Volume 2" instead of issue 18. They seemed to revert to the old numbering scheme for issue 19!
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