Hi Steve:
I've been out of computer science field for a long time since my college days but the old Studer List posts are in plain text file. I wonder if we have a member who can convert the text file into some database or other indexing files based on subject headings that the contents can be searched with keywords...
Ki
Hello all,
After joining the Yahoo Studer group, I too started reading the old Studer List posts. Or, I should say, I tried to start reading them, because the lack of formatting makes them extremely difficult to follow. Because I have my own long-term audio archiving project and wanted to have access to the collected wisdom of the Studer List, this past week I started learning about grep searching and "regular expressions" so that I could process the Studer List files in TextWrangler.
There are seven sections, collectively containing more than 10,000 posts, and I've got most of them in fairly readable shape already (it's pretty wild to do a search and replace operation on just one of the seven sections and see that 89k replacements were made!). Unfortunately, there is a randomly distributed set of about 250 posts that are almost completely undifferentiated masses of characters with no tabs or line feeds. Now I'm slowly slicing those down into the line-based units of all the other posts, and then manually selecting the body of the post for a "hard wrap" to make them readable.
When I'm finished, my intention is to import the whole archive into a searchable Filemaker database. In addition, since not everyone needs or uses a database like Filemaker, it would probably make sense to export the whole list as a simply formatted plain text document that is, at least, readable. I'll keep you posted on my progress.