HCMC Blogs

In order to get the wmv I ripped from web in to iMovie it needs to be just about anything other than wmv. I looked pretty hard but found no easy/cheap GUI apps for either Windows or OS X that suited my needs. So, as I did before I went back to linux.

Using mencoder, I transcoded it to an avi. This is the command:
mencoder tomthomson-030208.wmv -ofps 23.976 -ovc raw -oac pcm -o tomthomson_cbc.avi
which produces an enormous (340-ish MB) file using raw frame video and pcm audio
Alternate codecs include x264 etc. More info at the mplayer site.

Took off a bit early.

There are about 116 footnotes for VI 1858, and today I've processed 18 of them into their respective documents. The new metadata for despatch numbers and document types allows for slightly quicker linking (previously I had to add that info manually to the auto-generated link tag when linking to another document), and I can move notes into their documents as I process them now that the XSLT is able to handle footnotes in both the old and the new format.

Despatch documents often (usually? almost always?) contain a number in their <head> tag, which represents their incrementing number in the year in which they were written. This is distinct from the CO registration number, which was only given to despatches and other documents received and registered in the CO. This number has been missing, up to now, from the <teiHeader>, because it was in a range of different formats which made it slightly more difficult to parse out when the original conversion was done.

Today I put a few hours into this, and I think I've solved it. In the process, the following new items have been added to the metadata in the header:

• <idno type="despatchNo">1</idno>
• <idno type="despatchType">Executive</idno>
• <idno type="documentType">Secret</idno>

The first should only appear in despatches, as should the second; the third is a parallel to the second, in that many of its values ("Financial", "Judicial", etc.) are shared, but it applies to documents which are not despatches. This is the theory, at any rate; proofing will show how consistent this has turned out to be.

One consequence of this is that we'll be able to update the search page, to add a new element for "despatch number"; and also, I hope, we'll be able to make dates a little more precise, so you can search for a proper date range. I'm planning to work on this next week.

The situation is this: over the course of the last few decades, most departments of language and literature have come to demand that junior faculty members produce, as a condition for being seriously considered for promotion to tenure, a full-length scholarly book published by a reputable press. A small number of departments expect the publication of two such books. Whether these expectations are reasonable or necessary is a question that we should collectively ponder and debate. The immediate problem, however, is that university presses, which in the past brought out the vast majority of scholarly books, are cutting back on the publication of works in some areas of language and literature. Indeed, we are told that certain presses have eliminated editorial positions in our disciplines.

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2008/05/10/dlmpthree110.xml

You may remember 1998 for the Good Friday agreement that kick-started peace in Northern Ireland; for the Monica Lewinsky scandal; for the Pokemon craze; for France's 3-0 thrashing of Brazil in the World Cup final. You probably don't remember it for the launch of the MP3 player. But you should, because without the gloriously named MPMan F10, the world would be a poorer place.

The first document is marked up, with little difficulty, and I made SM a user on the db so that she can upload documents into it (replacing LN). She proofed the doc against the rendered view on the site, and everything looks OK, but I haven't taken a very close look yet.

JH brought in a stack of printouts which may or may not relate to the 160-odd documents we have that are transcribed but not marked up. Pat is working through those; he's marking up each document, with reference to the printout to catch any corrections that need to be done, and creating a file name for it which correctly locates it in the existing sequence of documents (the original filenames are often dupes of other docs in the db). He's also annotating the schedule JH provided with his printout, to record the filename used.

Meanwhile, I'm beginning to the enter the manual corrections to the BC 1858 volume which Jim made, and which he's now dropped off in a binder for me. Some are difficult to read -- I'm flagging those -- and the first few documents, inevitably, are actually V-series documents, but so far I'm doing OK. I anticipate about 20 hours to get through this, but it may go faster if the correction rate drops later in the volume.

Went to an interesting workshop on practical techniques for evacuating people from buildings in the event of an emergency. Came away convinced of a couple of things: first, I need to make sure I know exactly where the muster points are for earthquake and fire (they may be different), and second, we need to buy a couple of blankets. Tagging this as a task to remind myself.

For nineteenth century researchers, wondering about digital resources in their area, Jerome McGann, Director of NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship), has a welcoming and informative message (see below).

According to the NINES website:

N I N E S stands for a Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship, a scholarly organization in British and American nineteenth-century studies supported by a software development group assembling a suite of critical and editorial tools for digital scholarship.

In NINES you can:

1. search and browse more than 175,000 peer-reviewed texts, images, and citations in 19th-century studies
2. build your own collections of documents, articles, images, and ephemera;
3. organize, add keywords, and annotate your work;
4. discover lines of critical inquiry related to your own;
5. and (coming soon!) create syllabi, annotated bibliographies, illustrated essays, and timelines.

Here's Jerome McGann's posting to the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Listserv

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