Colonial Despatches

There are issues with the search engine relating to both authors and addressees of correspondence. The drop-down lists are generated from distinct values of tags in the header. These tags, inherited from the Waterloo Script, contain plain text, and so the same individual is identified in a variety of different ways. It would be helpful if we could tag these names with ids from the personography, and then build our search engine drop-downs in a more intuitive fashion.

It seems best to start with the addressees, since they constitute a much smaller number (only 89 distinct values, listed below). The simplest approach would be this:

• Create an XML file listing the referents (or just use the search_lists.xml file).
• Identify each referent and tag it with the appropriate id from the personography.
• Create a default personography entry for completely unknown people, uncertain people and missing people.
• Fix any known oddities (like the square brackets around Carnarvon in one document).
• Write an identity transform that adds the appropriate id to all files.
• Update the search form generator so that it pulls appropriate info from the personography based on the distinct values of the name/@key attributes.
• Update the search form and the search to use the new feature.

Addressees:

• [Carnarvon]
• [None]
• [Unknown; Eliot?]
• [Unknown]
• [Various]
• Adderley (Parliamentary Under-Secretary)
• Assistant Secretary of State
• Assistant Under-Secretary
• Ball (Parliamentary Under-Secretary)
• Banister
• Barclay
• Begbie, Thomas
• Birch
• Birch (Assistant Clerk)
• Blackwood
• Blackwood (Chief Clerk)
• Blackwood (Senior Clerk)
• Blanshard
• Buckingham
• Cardwell
• Carnarvon
• Carnarvon (Parliamentary Under-Secretary)
• Chief Clerk
• Clerk
• Colonial Office
• Colonial Secretary
• Desart (Parliamentary Under-Secretary)
• Douglas
• Duke of Argyle
• Earl Grey
• Elliot (Assistant Under-Secretary)
• Elliot (Permanent Under-Secretary)
• Fortescue (Parliamentary Under-Secretary)
• Gairdner (Chief Clerk)
• General Public
• Gladstone, R.
• Granville
• Graves, S.R.
• Grey
• Grey, Sir George
• Hankin
• Hawes
• Hawes (Parliamentary Under-Secretary)
• Head Clerk
• Herbert (Assistant Under-Secretary)
• Herbert (Permanent Under-Secretary)
• Herman Merivale
• Herman Merivale, Esq.
• Herman Merivale, Esq. Under Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs
• Higgins (Private Secretary)
• Holland (Assistant Under-Secretary)
• House of Commons
• Irving (Junior Clerk)
• Kennedy
• Kimberley
• Labouchere
• Lytton
• Merivale
• Merivale (Permanent Under-Secretary)
• Molesworth
• Monsell (Parliamentary Under-Secretary)
• Musgrave
• Newcastle
• Officer Administering
• Pakington
• Palliser
• Palmerston, Viscount (Secretary of State, Treasury)
• Palmerston (Treasury)
• Parker (Private Secretary)
• Peel (Parliamentary Under-Secretary)
• Peel (Under-Secretary)
• Pelly
• Prince of Wales
• Queen Victoria
• Robinson (Senior Assistant Clerk)
• Rogers
• Rogers (Permanent Under-Secretary)
• Russell
• Sandford (Assistant Under-Secretary)
• Secretary of State
• Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
• Seymour
• Smith
• Stanley
• Stanley (Foreign Office)
• Under-Secretary for the Colonies
• Under-Secretary of State
• Under-Secretary of State Foreign Office [sic]
• Young

Following one of KSW's notes in this post, removed date tags from specific location in 17 files. This is presumably for consistency -- only 17 files had them -- and because I suspect some useful parsing can be done/is being done based on the first date in the text being the date the document was penned.

Items in the indexes have a link under their info popup which enables you to retrieve references to them in the correspondence, but sometimes there are no references (as in the case of peripheral bios, which are referred to in other bios but not in the actual correspondence). Previously, clicking on the "Mentions..." link simply did nothing in these cases, but I've now added a trap for this condition and an appropriate error message.