If you’ve been reading this blog, you know about my effort to create a detailed historical survey of the record-setting storm of 1862, which began in December 1861, lasting so long it was called the Noachian Deluge by many alive at the time; it was more than forty days and forty nights, you see.

I’ve been drawing together volunteers to find and transcribe contemporary news accounts. It’s painstaking work. (Wanna help?) Wonderful Thinkwalks volunteers Caesar Napolitano, Barbara Cannella, Jessica Krakow and Kerry McGuire have made it go smoothly—when there’s material available. Some of it has to be sought in hidden places in old archival storage, microfilm and so forth, and that’s assuming we can tell it exists. Some of it isn’t even cataloged.

But things may be getting easier, at least regarding a few old newspapers. The CDNC has been plugging away at the thousands of pages of news that was written since the dawn of California. The images on their site are most useful to my research, as the OCR (text recognition) digitized version is almost impossible to breeze through, having dozens of mistakes per line. But the fact that they did do OCR means relevant articles might be found with a simple keyword search—sometimes.

Access to major, i.e., prolific, papers requires a lot of work. First they’re found, then scanned, then divided into pages, then articles, then read as text, with not a lot of human time available to get past the numerous automated glitches. Then they are posted on the site. Access to mining camp papers (there were many, as the population of California was largely occupied in mining at that time), small town papers, weeklies, and other great sources will progress very slowly.

I spoke with Andrea Vanek at the project’s Berkeley office and she says grant funding, which may run out at as soon as this summer, has allowed them to digitize half a dozen papers in California for certain years only. The total so far is a few hundred thousand pages. When you consider a SF Call Sunday Edition from 1910 had more than a hundred pages, that means only a small dent has been made in the tens of thousands of news publications that have been printed in our state.

For our target time period, the CDNC project has already worked through the Sacramento Union, which we at Thinkwalks haven’t yet done anything with. It’s going to be full of 1861 & 1862 flood news. (They had devastating floods there.) They’ve also completed much of the SF Daily Alta, and a paper in LA. Since their OCR is low quality (based on limits in the low-tech originals and the microfilm itself), they’re hoping to implement a user-correction option. When it comes, we’ll submit all the stuff we’ve already hand-typed from transcription sessions.

Historically augmented reality is hitting its stride, with both entrepreneurs and public entities digging up old photos to overlay on the real world, using iPhone apps. Here are some augmented reality project links. Many are just news of plans, or prototypes, rather than finished projects. Philadelphia, Time shutter, Retronaut, Museum of London (& a blog post about it). There are also some map versions.

I predict the augmented reality fad now underway with photos will eventually extend to text, probably as a result of genealogy research. Someone will try to create descriptive text from history that you can hear or read when you are in the place described, just as my 2nd cousin Steve Echtman has created an app that tells you current info about where you are.

I suspect, also, someone will try to create a database of everyone who ever lived, and that requires looking at all text, right? Genealogy is the driving force behind a lot of history research these days. Mormons are obsessed with it for religious reasons, for starters, as are many others. Maybe grant money can come from rich users trying to buy an afterlife by saving souls. (If I understand right, collecting names of people that have died allows those who believe Mormon doctrine to improve their expected afterlife.)

If you want to help find and transcribe news from the storm, some of which will go to reconstruct the weather system as it passed through and dumped rain for weeks, please get in touch.

An exciting meeting took place this week, as mentioned two posts ago. I hired Amy Conger to help systematize Thinkwalks projects. I’m so glad she agreed to help. I worked with her for years back in the 1990s at EpiCenter DeskTop, my two-storefronts-business in the Haight Ashbury and the Castro. I know and trust her, and she’s got a great creative mind and excellent values, by which of course I mean they concur with mine!

You’ll get to know Amy more later.

Are you wondering why the tour schedule is so sparse? Are you wondering why I’ve suddenly starting bloggin’ regular-like? (Yep, this is my second “weekly update”!) I know there are some people who check in here regularly, despite my alerting systems not being fully in place. But precious few of you at this point, and I aim to change that. We currently get about 18 unique visitors a day to this site.

So what are we doing about it? We’re setting up long-term systems, based on my “test year” of the past ten months.  We’re improving tour PR, expanding and promoting the Life History Books sideline I have (to help provide Amy’s keep), sweetening the site with hidden treasures and functioning Goodies, finalizing a business plan, and playing with Twirlyups.

All this, of course, while I’m leaping into research for the storm and flood book. I’ve taken to including the “storm and” part, since just focusing on the flood is awfully like just focusing on the fire caused by the 1906 quake. Why not keep eyes on the 1,000-level storm, the defining event, itself?

As extreme weather events increase, I note that our recent canoe trip to Canada was all rain and unseasonably chilly. While we were far out in the wilderness camping, hurricane Earl was sweeping past to the east. Ah, weather after my own heart (and before my own book).

Feel free to volunteer on the project, as did database guru Nancy Botkin, designer Martina D’Alessandro and researchers Chris Dichtel (who found me a wonderful article on the storm from an 1862 Illustrated London News[PDF here], see page 10) and Barbara Cannella (who’s been collecting data on the rescue—and rubber-necking—steamers that went up into the Central Valley during the floods of 1862).

Yes, there is a lot of excitement, here at Thinkwalks. If you’re interested in pitching in with a donation, there will soon be a better set-up on the Donate page, but for now the easiest way is to Use your credit card and PayPal your amazing generosity to thinkwalks at earthlink doink net.

I believe in open books for all my projects, and will happily share my financial and planning data with anyone who asks. Bottom line so far: Thinkwalks netted about $1,250.00 after expenses during the January to October test period. Unfortunately, none of those expenses was pay to myself. So I decided to pay myself $2,500 for the year, leaving a $1,250 debt to be recovered by future earnings. Just reverses that little ± sign, doesn’t it. Tricky, eh?

Expenses are soon to be increasing, with Amy on board, but the result will be something to see. Stick around, and thanks for your patience in the meantime. I promise that all you who’ve asked to be on the “weekly” email list will soon be getting ‘em just like that.

Meanwhile, read that article in the March 29, 1862 London paper! (Scroll to the reprint’s page 10.)

Some of the clear needs at the moment are for people to help compile information either from bibliographies or from very old news articles on the Great Storm and Flood. And to distribute (to cafés) the wonderful flyers Martina D’Alessandro designed in her volunteer gig. Also, there’s a volunteer design project underway in mapping some of SF’s great public art locations, if you have ideas or want to help. If you have skill in FileMaker Pro, there’s some adjustment (or even data entry) to be done with the database. And some very nerdy research to do on fun subjects like finding schematics of an old bridge in GG Park, lawsuits from 1862 about a lake that is described but not reliably enough to be sure it existed.

So if you have an interest in figuring out the past and/or microfilmed newspapers get in touch!

Here’s Martina’s sweet flyer. It’s two sided, folded. It ends up 5″ x 5″—perfect for a self-standing table card or flapping protrusion from a bulletin board. Flapping protrusion! Is that racy or what!?