AwardAnnals:About
From AwardAnnals
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Conception
The Award Annals was conceived and executed by Kenny Lucius in the summer of 2004 because of his unfulfilled desire to buy a good sci-fi book. Kenny didn't like any of the sites that listed Hugo and Nebula awards—they just weren't set up for browsing. Kenny wanted a list of winners and nominees grouped by year so he could have a month’s worth of reading on one page. He wanted to see the cover art, read a synopsis, and see the prices without having to cross-reference or click all over Amazon. Just one simple page.
This simple page snowballed into a database of thousands of honored titles.
Kenny started with a Titanium PowerBook running OS X 10.3. Using only TextEdit, his page took shape. Then he installed MySQL along with CocoaMySQL which he extended to facilitate the gathering of book data. Arrangements were made to host the site with an altogether cheap host. Kenny had to learn PHP (very similar to C, fortunately) to program a web interface to the database. The nature of search engine crawlers demanded simplification of the design—no frames, more keywords, and a more straightforward document structure.
Then, rather suddenly at the end of August ’04, it all came together. Kenny froze the design and concentrated on adding books. In just a few weeks, the first fifteen awards were well-populated with winners and nominees—most of them back to 1990.
Currently, Award Annals is the largest wiki hosted by WikiPresto. The development and testing is now done on an iMac with MAMP. Early in 2007, Kenny abandoned his homespun system for MediaWiki for various reasons, not the least of which is to allow others to contribute to the site and add awards for music, art, or whatever.
Wiki architecture
Award Annals is a wiki like any other, a collection of editable pages. The software used by Wikipedia has been extended to generate the site’s principal product: the honor roll. An honor roll is a simple list of creative works ranked by the honors each work has received from awards. The extensions to the MediaWiki software are described in a series of How-to articles.
There are two types of pages needed to generate an honor roll. A creative work page contains an infobox that represents an entry in a database of works. An annal contains a similar construct that lists the works that have received a specific honor, and adds an “honor score” to the appropriate entries in the database of works. Each work in that database then has a score that allows them to be ranked.
The honor roll itself is simply a page that displays the results of a query on the database of works. The query can specify a genre (sci-fi books) or a particular award (Hugo novels). Similar queries for creators are also available (Hugo-honored authors).
Award Annals is not open to anonymous users—to edit a page you must register with a validated email address. This is necessary to reduce spamming and vandalism. Also, to ensure the integrity of the honor roll scoring, permission to edit annal pages will be granted by the administrator only to those who are not associated with a marketing firm or any other biased or commercially-motivated entity.
Value
What is Award Annals good for? Who needs it?
The data gathered on this site is somewhat unique. Information about a particular work may be abundant, as are press releases from literary awards. A similar list of honors for a few of the works may exist elsewhere. The honor roll, however, is unique to Award Annals. Its uniqueness is probably due to the effort/reward ratio—it will never be commercially viable. The internet ads and bookseller affiliations barely cover the hosting costs.
This site was initially designed for readers who are looking for high-quality literature. The honor rolls display cover art and synopsis suitable for someone browsing for an interesting book that has been pre-judged—either by a panel of literary experts or by a gathering of fans. Librarians use the honor rolls to plan purchases. Students use it for research. It is entirely possible that authors brag about being included in an honor roll, but probably not.
Future
Award Annals will continue in its current state so long as Kenny can afford to maintain it. Because it is a wiki, it is possible that Award Annals may grow far beyond its current state. Anyone who demonstrates a little interest can document an award. There are many, many literary awards that are not represented. Film and music enthusiasts can take part and develop those anemic areas of the site. Awards that no longer exist may be added to honor older works. Award annals currently tracks only books, but short stories, poems, publications, and other works can and should be added. Kenny may not have time to develop Award Annals to its full potential, but he will enable others to do so.
