Digitising Historical Caving Data with Python and Django

TALK: Digitising Historical Caving Data with Python and Django by Andrew Northall

Endless quantities of old but critically important data is trapped in paper journals and reports across the world. Is it possible to extract this data and make it available to the masses, even when the data is highly specialised and of poor quality? That is what I did for reports of caving incidents and accidents dating back 50 years. The National Speleological Society has published American Caving Accidents since 1967, documenting thousands of incidents, and despite being freely available as PDFs, these are unindexed, poorly scanned, and basically impossible to use as a learning tool. In this talk, Andrew Northall shows us how he built a system that programmatically processed these documents into a structured, publicly searchable database.

More information: https://2026.djangocon.eu/speakers/GJUXR3/

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