HCMC Blogs

This work is an open-access introduction to programming in Python, aimed at working historians (and other humanists) with little previous experience. Introductory lessons teach you how to

1. install Zotero, the Python programming language and other useful tools
2. read and write data files
3. save web pages and automatically extract information from them
4. count word frequencies
5. remove stop words
6. automatically refine searches
7. make n-gram dictionaries
8. create keyword-in-context (KWIC) displays
9. make tag clouds, and
10. harvest sets of hyperlinks

The Programming Historian is a work-in-progress. We are constantly adding new material, much of it driven by reader request. Upcoming topics will include indexing, scraping projects, simple spiders, mashups and much more.

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has launched a new website called A Nation’s Chronicle: The Canada Gazette:

“Often referred to as ‘the official newspaper of the Government of Canada,’ the Canada Gazette has been an important instrument in the Canadian democratic process for more than 160 years. It has served to inform Canadians of the operations of government and to involve them actively in the legislative process. With this site, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), in co-operation with the Canada Gazette Directorate, Public Works and Government of Services Canada, will make the Gazette available online, in its entirety, for the first time (…)”

Approximately 30% (almost 300,000 pages) of the total Canada Gazette content is now online. This includes:

1. Part I - 1983-1997
2. Part II - 1950-1976, 1983-1997
3. Part III - 1985-1997

Second day on late duty this week.

Spent most of the afternoon documenting new features in Transformer, with screenshots, and tweaking the app where I came across something less than ideal. At the end, I wanted to do a test build of the help file, but ran into an indecipherable error with Saxon 9B running in oXygen 9.2:

Saxon 9B null

When trying to validate the XSLT stylesheet, I got this equally unhelpful feedback:

SystemID: C:\Documents and Settings\mholmes\My Documents\Borland Studio Projects\my_projects\mdhHelp\mdh_docbook_to_html.xsl
Description: net.sf.saxon.style.XSLVariable.getReferenceList()Ljava/util/List;

I don't know from this whether Saxon is broken, or whether it's been updated in oXygen 9.2 to a new version which stumbles over an error it was previously happy to let slide. But this stylesheet was working under 9.1, because I used it to build the IMT Help file, and that no longer builds either. Posted a message on the oXygen forums; we'll see if anyone else has seen it. Failing that, I'll try reinstalling oXygen, and perhaps also running the transformation on other machines.

Sat down with Pink Sheep to discuss the progress on the site. A few design constraints were made clear, so I can clean up the implementation a bit now, which is good.

Pink Sheep will do a bit of adjusting as well, and provide a few more graphical elements for inclusion.

Bit the bullet and installed SP3 on my dev machine. I did this with some trepidation, as the SP3 install had hosed one of my home computers by trashing the ATI graphics driver. On my work computer, everything seemed to go smoothly, although there were many warnings from the firewall (Sunbelt Kerio); however, on reboot, I got a black screen with only a mouse cursor. Pressing Control-Alt-Delete brought up the Task Manager, though, and also the firewall window, which had been waiting invisibly for input. Had to go through this sequence many times as SP3 set itself up, with the firewall window stopping the process without showing itself, until the 3-finger-salute brought it up. But everything seems OK, fingers crossed. Now doing a bunch of other updates that apparentrly weren't in SP3.

Down to 74 remaining notes. I've noticed increasing numbers of typos in these notes, especially slight -- or sometimes significant -- errors in references to other documents in the collection, such as wrong filenames or dates. I'm correcting these as I go, where the correction is obvious, and flagging them where further research is needed.

Link: http://themedium.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/in-this-weeks-magazine-lexicographical-longing/

The future is here, and the immortal O.E.D., the one that lives in bound pages last published micrographically in 1991, is obsolete — at least according to the folks who publish it. As of now, Oxford University Press has no official plans to publish a new print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

If news of the recent devasting earthquake in China has left you feeling shaky and you own a Mac laptop, SeisMac--a free program that turns your computer into a personal seismic station--may be just for you.

SeisMac uses the acceleration sensor inside your laptop to register vibrations; the program was developed with support from such blue chip institutions as the National Science Foundation and the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, a consortium of almost 100 universities.

Link: http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/05/14/sync

From today's Inside Higher Ed, news of Blackboard's Facebook (Backboard Sync) application that brings Blackboard's service to Facebook.

Blackboard, the course management giant, is hoping that a Facebook application will help it reach students even when they’re trying to avoid studying. Deploying a central fact of students’ work life into Facebook could be tricky business, but the social networking behemoth did start out as a college-oriented site complete with a popular course-schedule display, after all. The application, called Blackboard Sync, certainly raises questions about what a course-enabled Facebook would do: Send constant News Feed updates that “Adam received a B+ in Introduction to Statistics” or “Robyn dropped out of Intermediate Microeconomics"? Add the ability to “poke” one’s professor? Remind students not to forget their homework?