Subterranea

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Have a look at Documents/Magazines/Subterranea which shows how a single page can display all the magazines and their articles, with filtering.


Subterranea is the magazine of Subterranea Britannica. The first 48 issues, from 2003 to 2018 have been placed in the public domain. This wiki demonstrates how they can be automatically presented by processing the Index-1-50-alpha+keyword.pdf file to csv (and adding 2 columns for location and area for each article). In this demo, only Air Raid Shelter articles were chosen, so this site was created automatically by processing the following 7 line file. The full index is 600 lines.

"Air-Raid Shelter Policy in the UK","Robin Woolven",20,63,"Sept 2009","Air Raid Shelter","UK","UK"
"Air-Raid Shelter, Kenley, Croydon","Paul Sowan",19,50,"May 2009","Air Raid Shelter","Kenley,Croydon","London"
"Air-Raid Shelters, St. John’s Schools, Reigate Surrey","Paul Sowan",20,60,"Sept 2009","Air Raid Shelter","Reigate","Surrey"
"Austin Longbridge Factory","Neil Wedgbury | Paul Sowan",18,53,"January 2009","Air Raid Shelter | WWII","Longbridge","Birmingham"
"Foxenden Air Raid Shelter","Paul Sowan",41,53,"April 2016","Air Raid Shelter","Guildford","Surrey"
"Gerrards Cross Air Raid Shelter","Nick Catford",15,30,"Dec 2007","Air Raid Shelter","Gerrards Cross","Buckinghamshire"
"WWII Shelters in East London “Shelter in the East”","Andrew Emmerson | Paul Sowan",10,31,"April 2006","Air Raid Shelter","Bethnal Green","London"

A page was produced for each article, author, topic, and area, and uploaded to this mediawiki based Wiki en-masse. See Topics, People, Areas. The pdf files for the magazines were annotated with bookmarks that map the magazine page numbering to the pdf page numbers, so links to Subterranea 1.pdf#5 will jump straight to page 5.

Articles can have many topics and authors. Consistent naming helps here.

Each article has been given a position, in English, which is looked up with geolocation software, and an area for grouping the articles.

Maps can either can be done as external links or embedded in pages

A Google custom search allows searching in the text of all 48 magazines.

This technique could be repeated for any set of PDFs, provided a suitable index document exists. I would only be prepared to implement it for publicly accessible sites, not behind a paywall

Start with WWII Shelters in East London “Shelter in the East”, have fun.

John Bray