Colonial Despatches

Martin,
Thanks for posting a write up of yesterday's meeting. I have a couple of questions.
• KS-R should be KS-W shouldn't it? (i.e. Kim Shortweed-Web).
• In addition to names, Kim will be expected to mark up ship names and places. In addition to abstract writing I think that Kim should also create a subjects headings for each dispatch and attachments. There is list of B.C. Subject headings available from the AABC (the Association of B.C. Archivists) from which we may wish to create a separate table in the data base. I'll look into this and e-mail you the list. There is also a list of place names - a gazetteer for B.C. which I can send you if think it would be useful in choosing standard place names. Finally, the Maritime Museum has, I believe a list of ship names that I can also look into right away.
• In addition I think we said that Kim might have to do some scanning to supplement, where it is needed, some other materials mainly microfilms.
• The question of whether we have two websites or one is very tricky. I agree that it would make sense to keep everything in the same database if possible. However, if you look at one of the Mystery sites: they are very self-contained. In the application I referred to two separate websites: bcgenisis_learn and bcgenisis_search. The learn site would contain each of the four mysteries i.e. the selected transcripts, maps, and photographs together with the teaching materials. The search would be (as now) to allow unfettered searching. My concern about combining the two would be that it could lead to confusion if grade five students can easily hit the wrong key and end up in the search interface and not know how to navigate back to where they were. I would like to hear more from John on this before we decide whether the two websites should be combined into one. But I certainly agree wholeheartedly with your point that everything should be xml or xhtml so that it standards compliant into the future. Another side issue is that the learn database will have to link to some material that we don’t have within eXist (ie. The CHIM documents, etc. at LAC.) Would this be a problem?
• I think that JL said that he was going to approach Jim to write an introduction to the VI 1846-1859 material.
• I am wondering whether the mystery that I am trying to solve with regards the setting up of a separate crown colony for B.C. in 1858 rather than annexing it to VI shouldn’t be one of the “compelling narratives” in this section. I have found some very compelling narrative visa vie the conditions in Vancouver Island in the Commons Committee on Hudson’s Bay licence Hearing, 1857 (available as a early Canadian online document). One Mr. Cooper airs a lot of dirty linen about lack of progress and perhaps even corruption in the VI colony as well as about the intriguing possibility of the mainland. This testimony certainly was influential in the thinking around the two colony rather than one debate, the non renewal of HBC licence for the island, and probably in Douglas being asked to drop his HBC position. So it might be interesting to build a “mystery” around this issue. I must talk to JL about it.

Met for an hour and a half to discuss plans related to the ACDP grant. Outcomes:

• KS-W will come on board from August 17, working three or four days a week indefinitely, handling research and writing of bios and footnotes, linking of names and images, some possible scanning when we need it, proofing, and abstract writing, starting with 1846, based on PS's work, and moving forward as fast as possible. I'll track this work and make sure it stays on schedule; we need to finish all the years to 1859 to a point where they can be used by the educational content authors.
• JL will contact the consortium that will probably write the educational content. They will be given full access to the db, and will start work as soon as they can; they'll produce content in plain text format, which we'll then mark up in either XHTML or XML (probably the latter), and integrate into the current website. The original plan for a separate site seems unnecessary at this point.
• JL will also talk to MF about the possibility of her doing one or two days a week as project manager, monitoring timesheets and budgets, and working also on promo and public relations, eventually planning the launch.
• JL is around till August 22, CP till August 30, so we have scheduled another meeting for 1pm on August 17 in HCMC.
• There is money available to hire a programmer to cover some of my work, freeing me up for ColDesp, so I've started to cast around for someone who could do that (first choice DB, whom I've written to already).
• We have one year to get the work done and the product out.

Changed off-campus access settings, and also made various changes to the print stylesheet at JH's request, to reduce font sizes, line spacing and margins, so less paper is wasted when people print.

Long project meeting, to determine plans for the summer and fall. Details to note:

• 1846 and 1847 are to be done to perfection as far as this is possible, so they can act as a model of our ambitions.
• We have definitively settled on Chicago as the style guide, but we'll go for the simplest option: full biblio details in footnotes, on the first reference to a text, and then parenthetical citations using author-date. Footnote references will be relatively unformatted from an XML point of view, but wrapped in a <bibl> tag so they can be harvested and reworked later for a proper systematic bibliography.
• All people's names must be tagged for 1846-57 even if they link to sparse or empty bios initially. This enables us to figure out the scope of our biographies, and also to harvest the names for inclusion in DC metadata in the header, required by the IB grant.
• JH needs me to modify the print stylesheet to tighten up the font sizes and linespacing, as well as making the text spread right across the page, for better print-based proofing.
• Other stuff not for the blog.

Based on work done in the workshop last week, and article is taking shape, and this morning I had two hours of enforced solitude in a medical lab waiting room, with my laptop, so I was able to get some useful writing done. I have about 1500 words already, along with some diagrams, an overall plan, and some further notes; JL and JH will be able to fill in some of the gaps in knowledge and content which are outside my expertise, and I think we'll have something quite interesting when we're done. Although I was out of the office, I'm putting this down as work time; it was more productive than being in the office, actually.

Wrote some simple XSLT to extract the text from the body of the documents, and set it running against the collection; the results will be my base data for the text analysis workshop next week, and will also probably be handy for topic recognition etc. in future.

Met with JL and PS to discuss short-term plans for PS's work, and some key decisions. Out of that:

• We will use Chicago notes-and-bibliography style in our bios, footnotes, abstracts, and other academic content. PS will format the current crop of 1846 bios to comply, and we'll then later go back and work through existing footnotes and bios to standardize them.
• Once the 1846 bios are finished and linked (any time now), PS will then write abstracts for the three 1846 documents, as well as adding footnotes. This allows 1846 to become our first complete model. Either PS or I will later add the additional markup (placenames, vessels, etc.) to 1846 when we have made firm decisions on what we want to add, and how best to do it.