[MR] A (Probably Ridiculous) Heraldic Suggestion

[Gorm of Berra]

On 5/12/05, C. Brian Towey <cbt at ib-ent.com> wrote:
> a) As for scanning the whole library of registered emblazons, all it takes
> is a sheet feeder and some determination.  With a little ingenuity, one
> could use optical character recognition to read, say, a membership-number
> sticker in one corner of the form, which would let the computer
> cross-reference the picture to the person without a lot of keypunching.  I,
> for one, make my living doing this sort of thing, and I bet there are
> others.

UNfortunately, it's not that simple.

The single largest hurdle is Copyright.  The SCA, Inc and it's
subsidiary branches paid a lawyer to investigate the matter and the
current legal opinion is that the SCA does not have the rights to
create and distribute the images of people's Heraldic forms.

Yes, they can scan and archive (and in fact, they have been, it's an
ongoing process for many years because a. it's volunteer labor doing
an extremely unfun job, b. there's a limited budget for equipment, and
c. many of the old files are not in "feed it into a sheet feeder
scanner" condition), but that archive cannot be significantly
distributed.

Do I personally think that legal opinion is incorrect from a common
sense perspective?  Well, yeah, I do, but I'm not a lawyer...so I'm
probably wrong.

The second issue is that what we register is the picture, not the
Blazon/words.  As you saw if you read the list yesterday, folks get
quite ornery if anything related to "their Heraldry" gets changed. 
Since we Heralds assume that the submitter drew (or had someone draw)
what they wanted, we register the picture, and come up with words in
an attempt to describe the picture accurately.  It's an inexact
science at best.  Computers suck at inexact sciences.  Postscript is
great for exact descriptions of visual mechanics, but it's not any
good at "Is that an eagle displayed or statant?".

Finally, you have the issue that, honestly, Heraldic composition and
conflict checking software is never going to be anything more than an
extreme niche market.  There are ~60 Heralds in the SCA College of
Arms.  There may be another 200 heralds through the SCA who would be
interested in a good piece of software.  Six months of a good
programmer's time costs $100K or more (once you consider overhead as
well as salary).   That would make the software exceptionally
expensive to produce commercially and professionally.

Instead, we get "hobby" software, which can be quite wonderful and
well coded, but you run into matters like "I'm not interested in it
anymore".  It happens.

These aren't impossible bridges to cross, but they ain't easy either. 
Good Luck.

In Service,
the Database administrator sometimes known as Gorm