Colonial Despatches

I have edited the instances of "fn" tags for 1846 - 1857 XML files. I caught a few more groups in the process, and created a list of spelling variants that I can use for 1858.

KSW reported a failure to show some dates, and issues with bolding of names on the bios page. The date problem was caused by uncertain dates without text content -- I had been assuming that where dates were uncertain, a useful piece of text would be supplied in the tag content, but now where that's not the case, I'm using the @when attribute instead. Uncertain dates are also now being supplied with a following question-mark through CSS.

Bolding problems, along with some ordering issues I noticed myself, were caused by my failure to realize that there would be some people having no <surname> or <forename>, but merely a <roleName>. That's now fixed, and names are all bolded appropriately and sequenced correctly.

As hoped, I managed to complete the people, places, and date tags for the remaining years, up to and including 1857.

Along the way, I cleaned up a number of biography entries.

Spent some time updating the website a bit, and writing some content for the final report. The content has gone to CP, who is compiling it.

These are the stats I'm submitting for the final report, along with the method I used to get the info, so we can easily repeat the process at any time.

• 629 despatch documents linked and annotated.

  Use the website search with no parameters except "To: 1857".

• 782 individual people identified and tagged.

  In the eXist admin client:
  
  declare default element namespace "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0";
  count(collection('/db/coldesp/bios/')//person)
  

• 248 biographies fully completed.

  In the eXist admin client:
  
  declare default element namespace "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0";
  count(collection('/db/coldesp/bios/')//person[not(contains(./note/p, 'not yet available'))])
  

• 165 BC placenames identified and tagged.

  In the eXist admin client:
  
  declare default element namespace "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0";
  count(collection('/db/coldesp/places/')//place)
  

• 134 BC place "biographies" completed.

  In the eXist admin client:
  
  declare default element namespace "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0";
  count(collection('/db/coldesp/places/')//place[not(contains(./desc, 'not yet available'))])
  

• 99 seagoing vessels identified and tagged.

  In the eXist admin client:
  
  declare default element namespace "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0";
  count(collection('/db/coldesp/vessels/')//list[@type='vessels']/item)
  

• 88 vessel "biographies" completed.

  In the eXist admin client:
  
  declare default element namespace "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0";
  count(collection('/db/coldesp/vessels/')//list[@type='vessels']/item[not(contains(./p, 'not yet available'))])
  

• 13358 individual page-images created, at three different sizes.

  SSH into nfs.tapor.uvic.ca, then:
  cd /home1t/coldesp/www/jpg_scans
  ls -R jpg_800 | grep '.jpg' | wc -l
  

• 6025 page images linked into despatch transcriptions

  In the eXist admin client:
  
  declare default element namespace "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0";
  let $startPages := count(collection('/db/coldesp/correspondence/')//biblScope[@type='startPageImage'][contains(@facs, '.jpg')]),
  $pageBreaks := count(collection('/db/coldesp/correspondence/')//pb[contains(@n, '.jpg')])
  return $startPages + $pageBreaks
  

• 218 individual maps digitized at three different sizes

  Go to the map gallery on the site; the total is shown at the top of the page.
  

• 1472 HTML pages created or enhanced.

  1247 despatch docs incl. 1858
     1 browse by date page
     5 index pages (Index + sub-pages)
   219 map pages (gallery + 218 maps)
  ____
  1472 
  

• Over 1400 XML source documents made available through the site.

  In addition to all the transcription and annotation documents, there are lots of XML feeds also used by the site and available, some linked, some not, many created as dynamic views of the data.
  

Team meeting to discuss the launch and the way forward.Main takeaway for me is the requirement to complete bits of the final report that are my bailiwick asap.

Also added a page to the site, listing all the First Nations names and referring strings that have been tagged so far. This is not linked from anywhere yet; it's more so that we can get an idea of what's been tagged, and how easy it might be to impose an ontology on the names mentioned. We're still discussing whether to tag all referring strings, no matter how vague, or only names and name-like strings.

Lots of final tweaking, and a rebuild of the portable ColDesp, with the latest revisions to documents included. We've installed and tested it on GN's laptop as well.

Lots of final tweaking, and a rebuild of the portable ColDesp, with the latest revisions to documents included. We've installed and tested it on GN's laptop as well.

I have cleaned things up as much as possible in the time allowed. I will prepare a brief report of where things stand, and discuss this at the wrap meeting on the 23rd.

KSW reported that vessel names are not italicized inside vessel bios, which turned out to be caused by the fact that we don't process vessel name tags unless they have @keys; @keys will be added. I also tweaked the CSS so that such names are italicized automatically when they're in the vessel bio context, but not in the context of the main documents, where we shouldn't alter the text style.

There's one oddity in the vessel bio page, which is that when you click on the name of a vessel from inside another vessel's bio, the clicked-on vessel's bio appears as a popup; but in that process, it's extracted from the main list, and is never replaced in it when you close the popup, causing it to disappear from the list. That's obviously a bad idea. I'll be working on it.

After watching the presentation through on the TV at GH, I figured the final bit (snippets) needed longer display times for each of the items, so I've doubled those. I think we're ready now.

Place names and people names, as well as dates, have been completed for 1854.

Went down to GH with GN and tested our presentation played from the laptop through their large TV. Looks pretty good, although it can't do widescreen and it's CRT TV res. Might not do for showing the website, but that's not a problem really. We can find out about that on the day.

Spent most of the afternoon building a portable ColDesp, and learned that:

• Paths to images in the following files need to be changed:
  • docTemplates.xsl
  • strings_en.xsl
  • imageBrowser.xq
• I put the page-images in a subfolder /site/jpg_scans, and the maps in /site/maps.
• I also had to patch the sitemap.xmap file to add this:

  <!--Start hacks for portable version. -->
            <map:match pattern="jpg_scans/**.jpg">
              <map:read mime-type="image/jpeg" src="jpg_scans/{1}.jpg"/>
            </map:match>
            <map:match pattern="maps/**.jpg">
              <map:read mime-type="image/jpeg" src="maps/{1}.jpg"/>
            </map:match>
  <!-- End hacks for portable version. -->
  

• Testing this on the laptop, I discovered that I had to set JAVA_HOME in my .bashrc file to get Tomcat to start up properly:

  export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
  export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
  

  I've also used java-6-openjdk on my main machine, and both seem to work fine for Tomcat and Cocoon.
• I also discovered that Chromium refuses to access an http://localhost:8080 address unless there is an internet connection! Firefox also balks initially, but if you uncheck "Work offline" on the File menu, it works. That was unexpected.

Otherwise, everything is working fine. I also made a small change to the schedules page at JL's request.

Note to self: having paths distributed across three files makes no sense. Could they be centralized? The problem really is the XQuery file, which can't get info from an XSLT file.

... and checked that they would fit in the car on the way back. We still need to find out if they need us to take the easels down or not.

Did some rough calculations of the scale of the remaining work and possible costs, based on work accomplished so far, for JL, who needs this for a meeting tomorrow.

I continue to work through the years of 1854 - 1857. I estimate that I should complete the tagging of places, people, and dates in these files by the 18th of June.

Lots of fixes required. I think the text got mangled or re-typed badly at some point.

Both 1852 and 1853 have had people and places tagged. It took roughly 3 days to complete 1853. Should this pace be possible to maintain, we should get through the remaining years by June 22, bu this is just a guess at this point.

Carmen Koning, External Marketing Officer, has all the materials required to begin the launch booklet. I asked that she liaise with me as needed on anything technical. I passed on the the email that Kerra StJames sent me regarding payment details.

All seven posters have arrived, and they look great. Although, for some reason, the "anatomy of a despatch" poster had the URL at the top left of the page cut in half. I will print off a sticker to cover up the mistake.

All account and payment details will be handled through Kerra StJames of the Ceremonies and Events office. I provided Island Blue with the FAST code Kerra had relayed to me by phone.