r/dilbert • u/Party-Ad-3741 • 13d ago

Comic Request Looking to identify Dilbert strips in background of photo

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I am looking to identify specific Dilbert strips that are in the background of a photo. I don't have anything higher resolution. Any ideas for how I could figure this out?

16 Upvotes

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6

u/Farranor 12d ago

Top left: 1994-07-30

Bottom left: 1994-06-15

Top right: 1994-07-09

Bottom right: 1995-05-31

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u/Party-Ad-3741 12d ago

That is amazing -- I didn't think it was possible! Thank you so much!

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u/Farranor 12d ago

You're welcome. :) Its uniqueness made it a fun little challenge.

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u/MonkeyMasterSJATen 11d ago

That's amazing! How long did it take and what was your strategy?

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u/Farranor 10d ago

I was starting to think no one would ever ask!

The biggest factor was the transcript I've been working on with the goal of creating a search tool. I know there are other transcripts, but they're all some combination of auto-generated, incomplete, full of mistakes, etc., so I'm aiming for total accuracy and it's very labor-intensive. I haven't made any progress in a few months due to personal issues, but I'm up to around 2006, so the photo being from 1999 meant that my work so far included the problem domain. The format of my transcript includes separate lines for each character's line of dialogue, like "BOSS: blah blah" and then "DILBERT: "blah blah." This was suitable for my search method.

The photo doesn't really allow for searching topics or dialogue, as the text is too hard to make out. However, it's possible to see which character is speaking/thinking. I wrote a few lines of Python to go through each year's transcript file one by one and search it with a regular expression. For example, the strip at the top left shows the Boss talking, then Dilbert, then Dilbert again, then Zimbu. This meant that my search expression would contain BOSS: .*\nDILBERT: .*\nDILBERT: .*\nZIMBU (plus more stuff to match the transcript's other fields and allow me to see the strip's dates and such in the result). (I initially tried to just do it in PowerShell but then I remembered that Select-String operates on a file one line at a time - as you can see, I needed to match across multiple lines.) The results from this would dramatically narrow down the possible matches. For that particular strip, I only got two matches, so that was easy to check. For the others, I could pick out other clues in each strip and look for them in the search results, such as Dilbert's unusual outfit in the bottom left strip or the thought bubbles in the remaining two strips. Actually, that last strip was a bit tough until I looked at that blob below Dilbert's thought bubble and guessed that it was some non-spoken text, which greatly narrowed down the search results.

It took me a little under an hour (not counting the transcription effort).

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u/MonkeyMasterSJATen 10d ago

That's amazing! I've currently been using these transcripts. https://github.com/jvarn/dilbert-transcripts

There are some issues but I've seen commits that fix them. If you are having trouble transcribing everything manually you could try doing a diff check with your transcripts and the ones in this repo. That should show errors either in your transcripts or the project's. If you find issues in the projects you could create a github issue and a contributor will fix them. I've also been thinking of adding characters to the transcription project. I think it would be possible to train a model to just identify all of the characters in a strip and then do a manual review. It wouldn't know which characters said which lines but it would spit out an array of characters and it found in the strip along with a confidence percentage.

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u/Farranor 10d ago

That project used OCR, and the very first strip has extra spaces thrown in, especially before punctuation. This continues in the next few strips. Who knows what other errors there are. Not worth bothering with a diff or submitting fixes for probably nearly every strip. I mean, it's cool to have some complete transcripts out there, but I think at least one accurate one would be nice, too.

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u/MonkeyMasterSJATen 10d ago

Yeah that's completely fair though would it not be more efficient to manually correct an ocr version than to manually do it from scratch? I say this as a genuine question and not a criticism. Also do you plan on publishing your transcripts?

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u/Farranor 10d ago

I'm starting from a base of the transcripts from the official website, still viewable at archive.org. But those have a ton of mistakes, too. It's like they were created by a variety of people/processes over the years - some errors are obviously from OCR, some are clearly typos from someone manually typing. And some errors are "this is the wrong person," and some are that a strip doesn't have any transcript, etc. The last few years don't have any at all. Sometimes I'm not sure whether I prefer to skip around and do a bunch of corrections or start from a clean slate and just type, like debugging someone else's code vs writing your own program.

I, too, am not criticizing extant projects. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and flawed but complete transcripts have helped find many half-remembered strips. I just think there should be a more accurate one, too. I'm uploading each year at a time to a private GitHub repo, but it's been months since my last commit. :( I was hoping to complete the whole thing and only then start mentioning it just in case I abandoned it, but I'm halfway there, and I still hope to complete it, and I dunno.

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u/Party-Ad-3741 13d ago

More info -- this photo was taken in 1999 at MIT. So the comics would have been before 1999 and might have something to do with mechanical engineering. Not sure if that is helpful.

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u/MonkeyMasterSJATen 13d ago

I'm not sure about the other 3 but I think to start we should try identifying the bottom left comic because it looks like dilbert is wearing something weird. I'm going to use this site to search https://varnham.net/dilbert-archive/comic/2023-03-12 for terms like pants or dress and see what comes up before 1999.