Origins
Doctor
Who's Tragical History Tour
or "History of Doctor Who in Pictures"
(it has gone by several names over time) started out quite innocently enough
back in July 1995 when I was scanning some art for eventual use in the WWW Doctor
Who newsletter that I edited,
The Matrix Mutterings (hopefully you've heard of it, consider
it an order if you haven't). I had a hand-held scanner purchased for me as a
Christmas gift the previous year and had been using it to scan cover for Who
book and video novelizations. There's an art to hand-held scanners in making
the image look right, particularly from bound volumes, and many of the pieces
had to be "stitched" together, a laborious process for my (then) wheezing
486.
As my attention turned to still photographs, I became determined to attempt to scan the best still photography I could find, but without the need for stitching. The Stills Project then became a learning ground for optimizing the scanning process and producing good looking images. The earliest scans dating back to 1995 reflect that I had much to learn. My scanner scanned "dark" and unfortunately most of the images saved back then were over-compressed when saved in JPG format (which almost all are save for a few GIF files), so they were dark and small. As time and gumption permit I'm going to try to clean many of the worst of this bunch.
In any
event the project, which was originally intended strictly for consumption within
AOL's Doctor Who Online forum, ran into logistical roadblocks, although I continued
on and off (more of the former than the latter) to accumulate more images and
stockpile them. Late in 1997 I determined to finally to get the collection out
for everyone to share somehow, and even though AOL server resources at that time were limited. The site was inaugurated on Doctor
Who's 34th Anniversary, November 23, 1997. Version 2.0 of the site debuted
April 1st, 2001 and Version 3.0 premiered on May 1st, 2002.
Your guess is as good as ours about version 4.0...
Why is it (or was it) a Tour?
It may seem a little anachronistic now, but
back "in the day" when the Tour started out as a web project, and server
space--heck any kind of space, was at more of a premium, the way we images
were shown was a Season at a time, uploaded for one month, and then gone.
We began with the first season and moved forward in this way, as a Tour
would, cycling through the 26 seasons of the original series twice (taking 4
years and 4 months to do so) before moving to the permanent display format
used today. To change things up we also had galleries called "The
Panopticon" (themed galleries which struck our interest) and "The Eye of
Orion" (a request gallery). Endlessly fascinating!
What We
Don't Do...
While we like to
think of ourselves as a Doctor Who resource, categorizing an image database
this large tends to force the issue--not that it needed much in the way of
prodding--about what we choose to cover--and it simply cannot be everything
related to Doctor Who. We chose to devise rules--somewhat related to
that dreaded word "canon"--about what we would include in the Tour. At
it's simplest, it is BBC sanctioned Doctor Who--almost exclusively
televisual in nature--that fits within the continuing storylines begun in
1963 and still running today. Within that framework that means
"Dimensions in Time" isn't in as a piece of Doctor Who, nor is The Curse of
the Fatal Death, or are the Peter Cushing movies, or the stage plays--even
The Ultimate Adventure. We may have images from these events in
the Tour--but they would be classified most likely as either a miscellaneous
or "Who Not Who" image for that actor. Canon keepers elsewhere can
have fun shoehorning events into a singular timeline, but for our purposes
they simply don't work.
If you feel that you can persuade us otherwise let us know.
What's with the pop-ups?
A question we get from time to time asks about why there are
so many pop-ups on the site, and it's really quite simple. As of February 1st, 2008, there is over 3.2GB of image and html content accessible through
the site. Managing this is not easy... but there would just be
no way to have all of the content available if it were not for free servers
(and lots of them at that), and some of the lovely pop-ups that go with them.
We have, whereever possible, chose to go with servers which are theoretically ad-free, but even as pop-up blockers have proliferated, the free hosts find new ways
around them. Of course it's annoying, but until someone offering
bannerless free hosting with unlimited bandwidth knocks on our virtual door,
this is the way it must be. We'll also remind everyone that
Firefox
handles this stuff better than IE6 ever could.
Images
v Screen Captures
As the "mission" of the
site is to be a WWW Doctor Who Resource and provide as many high quality images
about Doctor Who as possible, the images presented on the site have been collected
from many sources, both print and electronic. Those scanned in are big in pixel
size, on purpose! Most competent graphics programs can very adequately scale
down images without significant loss of detail, but it is quite hard to similarly
scale up. Most images scanned in are 600-800 pixels in length on the long axis.
Images found elsewhere have almost always been kept in their original sizes,
with much more variation as to size.
Until recently, one thing I have strenuously tried to avoid however is the use of
screen captures as images. Screen captures have their place, indeed many
of the most potent images from the series can only be represented by using video
screen captures, but only now has the quality of images taken from digital sources
(DVD's) with newer capture software have come along sufficiently for inclusion
in the Tour. Indeed the recent quality of these captures rivals, after
suitable re-touching and color correction, many of the better images already
in the Tour.
Picture Nomenclature
The naming system for categorizing
the images is relatively straightforward and runs along four lines.
|
dX-YY-ZZZ.jpg 1. Primarily, and wherever possible images are categorized according to the story that they come from. They have the following name structure:
|
dA-BBB.jpg 2. There are also images which are either straight publicity pictures having nothing to do with a particular story or which haven't firmly been identified to a story yet. Those images are named:
If you can help to properly identify an image to a particular story, please E-mail me with your suggestion. If accepted the image in question will then get folded into the rest of the images for the story named. |
dX-YY-cZZZ.jpg 3. Screen captures as named like other 'story pictures' except that they have a 'c' worked into the name structure as follows: |
dA-wBBB.jpg 4. "Who Not Who" pictures for each Doctor also have a slightly different naming structure to the miscellaneous images for each Doctor, adding a 'w' to separate them from other pictures. |
The Score (pictures in The Tour by Doctor)
| 3892 | 3781 | 6408 | |||
| 2467 | 2167 | 17780 | |||
3319 |
2714 | 108 | |||
| 6346 | 1377 | ||||
|
Last updated March 30th, 2008 |
TOTAL |
50359 | |||
Tools of the Trade
We occasionally get questions about the tools used in constructing and mantaining the website. Here are the freeware tools we use for image management, processing, and site generation and maintenance. It should be noted these are windows-based apps.
The
Bi-Centennial Club:
The Bi-Centennial Club
is a special signification for those stories in the Tour which have had accumulated
over 200 images (excluding screen captures). As of
March 30th 2008 there
are 11 such stories. The leaders in the clubhouse
are:
The Enemy Within (543 images) |
The Stones of Blood (263 images) |
Attribution:
For those images that have been
procured from other sources on the WWW, and where it is possible I have endeavored
to cite the original sites (assuming they are still active) with active links
to those sites. However with so many images and having done this for going on
for 7 years now, it is well-nigh impossible to remember where everything came
from. If a picture appearing on the site originally appeared an a site of yours
and no attribution has been made, please E-mail
me and let me know and I will make the necessary acknowledgements and linkages.
Copyright:
Yes it might be an issue. Doctor
Who and associated names, titles, logos and screen captures (if any) are © 1988
BBC Enterprises Ltd. A majority of the photographs represented here in low-resolution
digital form originate from BBC Enterprises Ltd. Other photograph sources are
credited where known. Text sources
credited where known and used with permission where possible. No copyright infringement
is intended. No profit is ever made from these pages; no money is collected
from its use; no profit advertising is accepted.
No copyright
for the photographs represented on any of these pages is claimed. Images are
intended as a research and archive reference tool. People are free to use these
images for any non-profit purpose with the understanding that if the images
are ever removed from the Tragical History Tour due to copyright infringement,
all other copies of the same images are to be removed from other web pages at
once. I claim no responsibility for other web pages that link directly to a
URL beginning with drwhotht.phenominet.com.
If contacted
regarding a copyright infringement problem, I will comply with file removal
requests.
Other
Doctor Who Image Resources:
This site could not have been developed
without having other DW images resources out there on the WWW. The following,
although not comprehensive, will give you a glimpse of what else there is out
there.
There are other Doctor Who "art" resources for created Doctor Who-related imagery, but the above sites have an emphasis on still pictures as this site does.