Scandinavian-Canadian Studies

in pdf_mla_bibliography.xsl and tei_scancan_xhtml_mla_bibliography.xsl, we're processing articles which are part of larger books on the assumption that the larger book can only have editors. This may not be true, in the case of a book which is by an author, but has an introduction by someone else which is being cited. The working example (currently hacked so it appears OK) is the first entry in rudling_2_16.xml.

Suggestion from Ralph:

"I'd recommend Pantone 7460C spot. It'll give you exactly what you're looking for."

I'll check this out on Monday.

Errol Durbach, in the editorial Board and ongoing, is misspelled in volume 15 as Durback.

Added a rend="proof_only" attribute to the root element of two articles that still aren't proofed, and set up the XQuery pages that create lists of content so that they hide any items with a rend attribute (of any value). This keeps unproofed articles from casual readers, although they're still accessible by direct URL. I need to create a page which lists only these items, so John can do his proofing from there. This is not protected in any way; it's just not linked from the menu. We may add protection at some point if it's required.

In several documents, there are dates encoded in two slightly different ways:

<date value="1998">1998a</date>
<date value="1998a">1998a</date>

These are actually both from the same document. First, check whether this variance actually affects the output in any way; following that, pick one format and regularlize all instances.

It came in today.

As discussed in emails April 23, create a page to show revisions to documents subsequent to the print edition.

See email from John 23/4/07. Add periods as discussed, and update/create revisionDesc section for changed files.

• Look at this post for details of work and decisions required on the biblio.
• Fix the the three biblio items in the Godin paper which have been the subject of email discussion -- see the emails from April 4.

In the metadata rendering for the XHTML output, <biblStruct> elements in the <sourceDesc> tag were not fully rendered. This example shows only "Birgitta Steen" (name of the author whose book is being reviewed), instead of the full title of the article, which also includes the title of the book being reviewed. This may be because the latter is inside a title tag itself.

It turned out this was caused by a combination of factors. First, the processing of the <biblStruct> tag fell through to the bibliography processing code in tei_scancan_xhtml_mla_bibliography.xsl. That code has processing to handle one specific oddity: cases where there is no author or editor, and so the title of a document actually becomes its first component, and its sort key. Such cases were distinguished by wrapping the contents of the title in a <name> tag. I've now added code which distinguishes between that situation (where the only content of a title tag is a name tag), and the situation in the <sourceDesc> for a review, where the <name> tag is only a component of the article title, and is followed by another title tag for the book being reviewed.

All this is a little flimsy, and we should bear this issue in mind for the teiJournal project. I'm coming to the conclusion that the safest way to handle this for teiJournal is to have an inventory of biblStruct types (distinguished by the type attribute), each of which can then have its own distinct processing. This seems redundant, but in fact the rules for formatting are a) almost arbitrary, b) completely dependent on the type of document, and c) catalogued and explained in just such as way in style guides such as Chicago; our processing may as well follow the approach of the style guides it's implementing, and it will certainly be easier to find, diagnose and fix a problem, not to mention add another type with its own peculiar requirements. Finally, explaining to users how to do things will clearly be easier if it's based on the same kind of inventory as they're used to finding in style guides.

1. In the Farfan article, there are reference items which have no publisher or publication place, but because they have a publication date, the <imprint> tag is not empty, so a period is triggered (see line 284 of tei_scancan_xhtml_bibliography.xsl for instance). However, the date has been shifted to after the author, so there's no need for the period. Figure this one out. Perhaps a test on whether the date has been shifted would be appropriate.
2. There are instances of <title level="m"> inside <title level="m">, such as when the title of Hedda Gabler appears within a larger title. In these cases, the surrounding text is probably best left un-italicized, so perhaps we could elaborate that template appropriately.

With input from Trish, create a handout we can distribute explaining the ScanCan project.

Completed 11/01/07: Page was not retrieving any data at all; fixed that, but then I was faced with the same accursed character encoding problem as previously, with the author name "Jääskeläinen". The name should be converted to url-encoded form for submission to the XQuery, but the encoding process seems to go wrong; what's submitted is not what we would expect, and not what we get on the old Mustard setup. This is annoying; spent an hour trying to debug it, but no joy. I'll have to come back to this.