HCMC Projects

Summary of the Scraps project

The Scraps project has produced a web-based system to mark up and display multi-level digitized artifacts, such as scrapbooks, albums, etc. The Image Markup Tool is used to mark up the digitized images. The Scraps administration program uses the IMT files and other user-supplied data to create a hierarchical structure that is displayed by the Scraps viewer. Users can drill down through the layers of the hierarchy to view embedded objects.

The site for this project at http://lettuce.tapor.uvic.ca/~scraps/demo/ includes a demo page for Scraps and a bit of info and links for demo sites.

The development blog for this project is at http://hcmc.uvic.ca/blogs/index.php?blog=19.

Summary of an online database containing transcripts of the TimesColonist newspaper

The goal of this project is to take a collection of transcripts of new stories from early editions of the Times Colonist and other Victoria newspapers which are currently in text files containing special codes for various bits of information, normalize the records, put them into an SQL database and then write a querying front-end to allow students, researchers and the general public to have access to this information on the history of colonial Vancouver Island.

The development blog for this project is at http://hcmc.uvic.ca/blogs/index.php?blog=24.

Feature Story: The Colonial Despatches of BC and Vancouver Island

The Colonial Despatches digital archive contains the original correspondence between the British Colonial Office and the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. This project aims to digitize and publish online a complete archive of the correspondence covering the period from 1846 leading to the founding of Vancouver Island in 1849, the founding of British Columbia in 1858, the annexation of Vancouver Island by British Columbia in 1866, and up to the incorporation of B.C. into the Canadian Federation in 1871. The 1858 documents (over 600) are already online, and work is continuing on the other years.

All the material on Colonial Despatches site originates in the work of Dr. James Hendrickson and his team of collaborators at the University of Victoria, which resulted in the publication of 28 print volumes of correspondence several years ago. Those original transcriptions have been converted into TEI P5 XML, and presented in the form of highly interactive and searchable website. The site was given a formal launch on November 3, 2008, at the Maritime Museum in downtown Victoria, and has since attracted coverage in the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun, the Saanich News, the Victoria Times Colonist, and A-Channel TV News.

Summary of Video Markup project

This project allows an author to add transcript and event timelines to a digital video. The transcript is searchable and each instance of the search word found by a query is presented to the user in the context of the sentence containing it. The user can then click on the instance of the search word to go to the appropriate location in the video. A user may also search across the transcripts of all the lectures in the database. The system allows the author or user to create bookmarks which are saved on the server and can be retrieved later by other users. Our prototype data is taken from two lectures in the Lansdowne Lecture series at the University of Victoria.

The site is at http://lettuce.tapor.uvic.ca/~taprlans/.

Summary of FrancoToile Video Project

The purpose of the this project is to allow students to select from a collection of short video clips with transcripts, so that they can gain a sense of the diversity of francophone people worldwide. Catherine Caws of the UVic department of French is the academic researcher. The code is based on work done for the Lansdowne Lecture video markup project and is being extended to address the needs of this project.

The site is at http://lettuce.tapor.uvic.ca/~florevid/.

The development documention blog is at http://hcmc.uvic.ca/blogs/index.php?blog=12.

Summary of VIHistory project

The VIHistory project consists of a collection of statistical databases (in postGres) and an interface which allows searching within each and across the entire collection. The main technical issues in this project are: 1) providing a normalized abstraction for the structure of data across various datasets (censuses, business directories, tax records etc.) while maintaining the original structure in each resource; 2) providing a user interface which supports the wide range of audiences (academic scholars through members of the public asking geneological questions); 3) accommodating new datasets containing new fields in the future.

The site is at http://vihistory.uvic.ca.

Summary of London Map project

"The Map of Early Modern London" is a hyperlinked atlas of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London based on the "Agas" woodcut map of the 1560s. Over 200 sites and streets are linked to pages that provide a full historical and archaeological survey, quotations from John Stow's Survey of London, and a bibliography of literary references. Over 200 additional sites and streets are identified. For example, you can click on a street and find all the literary references in our database to that street. This site began as a pedagogical tool in 1999. It is in the process of becoming a scholarly tool with fully refereed articles. Technologies used include PHP, eXist, XQuery.

The site is at http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/.

Summary of Katakana project

This research involves creating a computerized database of katakana words in Japanese, in order to assess the changing role of the katakana script in modern Japanese written materials. The ultimate aim is to chart a basic shift in direction in Japanese orthographic practices in respect to how words are written. A schema has been developed and Oxygen is being used for the XML mark up. An eXist database generates statistics about the data, and presents it through a website.

The website is at http://tapor.uvic.ca/cocoon/katakana/, and more details on the project are at http://tapor.uvic.ca/projects.php#katakana

Summary of Nxaʔamxcín (Moses) project

This is a very small sample of an early beta-version of a database of Nxaʔamxcín (known in English as Moses, or Moses-Columbia Salish). Its purposes are:
1) To pull together all the materials on Nxaʔamxcín compiled by two of the linguists who have worked most closely with native speakers of the language in order to make these materials available and easily accessible to the Nxaʔamxcín community, rather than to leave them stored on file cards and in notebooks.
2) To serve as a searchable tool for learners, teachers, speakers, and linguists to encourage more active knowledge of the language.
3) To serve as an important source of material for the future compilation of a comprehensive dictionary of Nxaʔamxcín, an important goal of the Nxaʔamxcín Language Preservation Program.
4) To serve as a base to which additional language material, including audio and visual material, may be added easily.

The site is at http://www.tapor.uvic.ca/cocoon/moses/.

Summary of Graves project

Graves' diary (1935-39) manuscript includes 1546 pages including 117 enclosures: letters, clippings, photographs, post cards, notes, games, etc. The project's objective is to produce the first scholarly edition in print and electronic form of this unpublished diary. One of the issues in this project was successfully representing abstracts, enclosures and other peculiar features of the composition of the original documents. The HCMC created the database and search interface using XML-based technologies. The raw XML data is available on the search engine site. The site allows you to search by date range or text string. Technologies used include XQuery, eXist, Cocoon, Tomcat.

The home page for the site is at http://gateway.uvic.ca/spcoll/GravesDiaryProject/home.htm, and the search engine is at http://graves.uvic.ca.

Summary of Maclure drawings project

The goal of this project is to create a collection of annotated architectural drawings by Samuel Maclure, and particularly to engage students in their creation and analysis. The scanned images are to be annotated using the Image Markup Tool. The result will be a searchable database of features linked to the images, and of course the image files with popup annotations. In 2007, we intend to have students mark up images as part of a credit course.

More details on this in-development project are at http://tapor.uvic.ca/projects.php#maclurehouse.

Summary of the HCMC Project Documentation Blog

The HCMC implemented a blogging tool in late 2006 to document project work. Anyone may view our postings to this blog to discover the state of work on a project of interest, or issues we have dealt with that might of interest in another project or proposal.

The home for the blog is at http://hcmc.uvic.ca/blogs/. From there, you can search the blogs or select a specific blog to see postings for it.

For those interested in the development issues involved in implementing this blog, see http://hcmc.uvic.ca/blogs/index.php?blog=7.

Summary of Departmental Class Timetabler project

This project assists with the administrative task of assigning instructors to time slots for teaching classes. It allows the instructor to make a request to the departmental administrator, who then juggles all the requests to create the best possible schedule. It uses an SQL database on the server and a browser-based interface (php) for the users to make and edit requests and generate output suitable for the central booking office at the university.

The site is at http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/timetable.

Summary of Philosophy in Review project

This project provides a tool for the editor of a journal of book reviews to administer the task of assigning reviews to reviewers and seeing the review through to completion. It uses a database (mySQL) running on the server and a web-page interface (php) to allow the editor to complete needed tasks.

The site is at http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/pir/.

Summary of a site for administering abstracts and schedule for the ACH/ALLC Conference

This site is one of the more sophisticated we have created. It includes a system for administering the acceptance and review of abstracts submitted for a conference and a system for presenting information about those abstracts in a variety of ways (in the conference schedule, sorted by author, keyword, title etc.) and includes various output options (web page, pdf, xml, plain text). In addition, the collection of abstracts can be treated as a corpus allowing for a range of Humanities Computing queries to be applied (for example searching for patterns in referencing amongst the abstracts). We are using open source XML-based technologies throughout.

The site is at http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/achallc2005.

Summary of Scandinavian Canadian Journal project

This project enables the production and online distribution of the Journal Scandinavian-Canadian Studies / Études Scandinaves au Canada. Our aim is to provide Web-based access to the contents of the print journal in a range of different formats, including PDF, HTML, XML (TEI P5), and plain text (UTF-8). The data for each edition is entered as XML and from that we can produce the range of outputs needed for the printer of the hard-copy journal and on the website for those using the internet.

The site is at http://www.scancan.net/.

Feature Story: The Colonial Despatches of BC and Vancouver Island

The Colonial Despatches digital archive contains the original correspondence between the British Colonial Office and the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. This project aims to digitize and publish online a complete archive of the correspondence covering the period from 1846 leading to the founding of Vancouver Island in 1849, the founding of British Columbia in 1858, the annexation of Vancouver Island by British Columbia in 1866, and up to the incorporation of B.C. into the Canadian Federation in 1871. The 1858 documents (over 600) are already online, and work is continuing on the other years.

All the material on Colonial Despatches site originates in the work of Dr. James Hendrickson and his team of collaborators at the University of Victoria, which resulted in the publication of 28 print volumes of correspondence several years ago. Those original transcriptions have been converted into TEI P5 XML, and presented in the form of highly interactive and searchable website. The site was given a formal launch on November 3, 2008, at the Maritime Museum in downtown Victoria, and has since attracted coverage in the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun, the Saanich News, the Victoria Times Colonist, and A-Channel TV News.