Episode 64 - Non-English language materials on Trove

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We begin this week by noting that not only is the Football Writers Festival on in Sydney in just a week and a half's time,  but that FNR will also be streaming the event - more news on this as it comes to hand. 

Mark Boric is close to accomplishing a significant milestone - his quest to archive every edition of Soccer Action.

Massive praise coming Tony Persoglia's way from Ian, for helping salvage from digital oblivion some of Ian's articles for Football Victoria from back in the day. Here's hoping that the refreshed FV History page is the sign of better things to come.

Also, the State Library of Victoria is set to reopen on November 19th, which is good news for those who want to get back in there and research - although one suspects there will be space and time restrictions announced closer to the reopening date.

We look at Paul Hunt's struggle to find details of a Tasmanian cup final from the past decade, which allows Paul Mavroudis to go off on his incrementalist tangent again. 

Thanks to Trove aficionado Tim Sherratt, we've become aware not only that non-English language Australian papers are coming online onto Trove, but also that Tim has also set up a map site which allows to see what Trove newspaper materials cover different parts of Australia. 

(Paul adds a gripe about the National Library of Australia's refusal to participate in sharing his decades in the making breach of copyright)

This week we also acknowledge Greg Page's posting of this wonderful Reg Date frame at the Queen's Wharf Hotel in Newcastle.

In our main segment this week, Ian takes up the task of looking through non-English language materials on Trove, focusing on recently uploaded materials from the German and Italian collections. For the German language, Ian tries to figure out what the correct terminology would be for the word football in German, and how the relevant German language press would differentiate between soccer and other football codes.

For the Italian part of the discussion, we look at early Melbourne Italian club Savoia, and some of its participation in 1930s Melbourne soccer, including its 1933 founding, and participation in 1939 in the Northern Juniors competition, and a match report from that year. But we also look at some of the surprising items which get reported - like this table soccer tournament at Footscray's Capri cafe in 1957.

Paul also ponders about the future of non-English language uploads to Trove, and the problems that may arise - including the scanning and text recognition of compressed type non-Latin scripts (whether Greek or Cyrillic or Chinese), as well problems with scripts with ample use of diacritics; but also how useful will languages with significant changes to orthography and vocabulary be to contemporary researchers without those skill sets

In 100 Years Ago Today, we look at a lonely grave site for a pioneering early Queensland player;  skip quickly through the never ending Newcastle season; take a quick glance at hospital fundraisers; celebrations for the end of the junior season in Fremantle; and still in Western Australia, a junior Australian rules body complains about not only the soccer threat, but the lack of support from the most senior Aussie Rules body in the state.