Normally when laymen say "digitized" they mean one of two things: scanned images in a PDF or fully transcribed (and possible formatted) text extracted from the scan. The Complete New Yorker you're thinking of was mostly the former, with a bit of indexing (table of contents pointing to the PDFs if I remember correctly).
This latest digitization project does the latter, transcribing the text into their existing content management system and as far as I can tell, preserving much of the formatting. This comes with full text search, allows cross linking between articles, and all that good stuff.
I suspect that since they include an LLM summary and started this digitization project in early 2024, this was enabled by LLMs.
If I’m reading this correctly, they now have all their historic articles loaded into their CMS. I think they previously just had a system where you could page (and maybe search?) through scans of old issues, which is also cool but not as versatile.
When a lot of content was being put out on CD/DVD, a number of publications did but they are not straightforwardly accessible these days because they're usually on an old version of Windows. (Yes, if you want to make a project of it, you can probably get into them but has never been worth it for me.)
Surprisingly, this has been a project I’ve been tinkering with for years. There is an easy way to get the raw png/jpeg files out, but it does require a windows box. Im planning on working on it more over the long holiday.
The CDs I have seem to be proprietary for Windows from the late 90s. But I also have PDFs through 2005 on my computer which I must have "acquired" at some point.
The browser app might be some outdated Windows application, that's the case with the MAD DVD too, but you can find the actual issue files in some folders
Yes the file names are something unknown. It has a software to access. They did a damn good job.
For instance, in Disk 1, there is a big binary file mad.m1 492MB. That seems to hold content, but not sure what file type or which program can open it. Rest of the files are very small.
No mine were pre dvd era. In CD. Older. They had a surprisingly good UI with its own funny stuff. Your install that and insert the disk 1-7 based on which issue you select. Even scold you for installing wrong disk & comments about 'you can insert a CD of Yanni if you prefer screeching' or something like that. Lol don't know what mad has against him their comments are always funny.
