Documenting vacation days in August
September 15, 2008
Re-examining the remaining bits of the db structure that I haven't worked on yet, it seems to me that the relationship between documents, files, and document-to-inscription relationships is very puzzling. Either I've failed to understand it properly, or we've planned it badly. I suspect that what we really need are a separate documents/doc-to-insc component, and a file/file-to-insc component; or that the file, commentary and transcription fields should actually be part of the main inscription record. Waiting for info from GR to make decisions on this.
September 14, 2008
CaSTA (the Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis) 2008 will be held at University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 16-18 October 2008. The conference theme is “New Directions in Text Analysis.” There will also be a pre-conference seminar on “Digitizing Early Material Culture”
September 13, 2008
Link: http://www.commoncraft.com/reader
From the talented, innovative Common Craft team, a clear, step-by-step introduction to one of the most popular of the RSS Readers, Google Reader.September 12, 2008
Took off an hour early.
I've written the core JavaScript for the Inscriptions tab GUI; what remains is the db/AJAX JavaScript, and the back-end PHP, but it's all going fairly quickly because of the model of the simpler Documents tab. I've also tested the existing code successfully on IE, Safari, Opera and Firefox on Win and Mac as appropriate. Everything seems to run fine.
From today's Humanist, another example of how the visual representation of complex data is entering mainstream media with the following comparison from the New York Times of the words used by speakers at the two recent US political conventions showing the respective themes highlighted by both parties.
I have three of the four components of the UI working now. The most challenging and interesting has been the Documents area, which is like a smaller version of the Inscriptions tab which remains to be done. The challenge has been in creating a responsive and informative UI (lots of AJAX going on, lots of progress bar action), as well as figuring out what to enable and disable (enable editing of a record when only one is selected in the list; disable editing when more than one are selected; enable Save when a record has been changed; and so on). I can now transfer what I've learned to the larger and more complicated Inscriptions tab.
A report in today's Chronicle of Higher Education about Dr. Mark Marino's use of modular widgets for student submissions on his writing course web page.
Merino, a lecturer in the writing program at the University of Southern California, says that using Web widgets for online course materials furthers the goals of open courseware, efforts by professors and colleges to give away their lecture notes and other teaching materials online.
The main benefit of widgets over traditional Web pages is “portability,” Mr. Marino said in an interview. “We’re kind of saying ‘steal my content — take any piece of this class easily and put it where you want it.'”
Read more about Merino's work at the Writer-Response Theory Blog.
Link: https://nets.uvic.ca/telephony_renewal_unified.html
According to the Network Services site, Microsoft Exchange subscribers at UVic can now take advantage of a service called unified messaging, described as "a single in-basket for email and voicemail."