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week of Apr 9 - Apr 13 M stat, T 0 , W 0, R +1.0 process vihistory data, F +0.5 dh ctte followup

drafted 3 responses for dh ctte chair to review.

Created a building permits table in the vihdev db. Noticed that to auto-increment the building_permit_id field, you have to reference a sequence, so created the necessary sequence modelled on others I found in the db (census tables).

Processed the raw data file (spreadsheet) into normalized data (typed a couple of the data fields that I could e.g. int or date and normalized data to comply with the constraints I had established e.g. length of varchar fields). Saved that as a CSV (rather than tab-delimited) as the documentation seemed to favour the CSV approach.

Only substantial fiddling I had to do with the data was for all the records whose date field was only a year (e.g. 1889), I arbitrarily assigned them the 1st of January (e.g. 18890101) as the date field requires 8 digits.

Once that instance uploaded successfully, did the exact same thing in the production instance, just so I have a second copy of the thing somewhere.

Once that was all working in the dev instance of the db,

I've added new functionality to the stylesheet that builds the serOgraphies.xml file. As part of the information it gathers on each character, it also pulls out the beginning of each speech (<said>), and tells you what the nearest <rs> to that speech is. In other words, it calculates which epithet is most closely associated with each speech. This involved writing a couple of useful functions (hcmc:getTextOffsetBetweenTags and hcmc:getNearestRsTag) which will also be useful with the Map of London.

It's currently set to a distance limit of 250 characters (meaning letters/digits/glyphs, not literary characters), so that if there is no <rs> within 250 characters of the <said>, no epithet is returned. That distance can be changed easily in the stylesheet.

Still waiting for bio for this one, and keywords for both.