On late duty, and stayed a little later because PS and I were hacking away at the ColDesp site CSS.
April 22, 2008
This is the last of the major find/replace components, and I have the basics of it mapped out now. I should be able to get it done tomorrow, all being well.
We've been hacking away on and off on the home page, trying to arrive at a good balance between the perfect design and usability/sizability. Today we got quite a long way with it; one remaining thing we'll implement is probably margins in percent rather than widths in ems, and then reversing the order of the two main page elements, to try to get to a situation where the Welcome text box expands steadily, keeping the middle gutter relatively small, as the page width increases.
Completed the bibliographies file, although some odds and ends still need to be fixed and there are surely bugs. Corrected some missing tags in the biographies file and checked some references for it. Next steps: Start filling in some incomplete biography entries, check references where Dr. Hendrickson wasn't sure, and continue to fix bugs in the above files!
I need to develop an implementation plan based around his funding schedule, with proposals for how much of what kind of labour is needed (data prep, database design, client-server interaction, user interface, visualization interface), costs and likely sources for that labour.
In advance of the meeting with Simon I went through the files and got Martin to send me the XSLT which takes my xml input and generates ids for the recorder's reports and the trials. (Bailey_add_id.xsl and Bailey_ids_added.txt) Those ids are hexadecimal and there doesn't seem to be a way to turn those into decimal integers in xpath, so the output file will need to be processed.
Met with SD to confirm details of SSHRC grant and have initial discussion.
SD has $87,000 over 3 years (28k, 28k, 31k) to fund research (including travel for him to England) of the data, preparation of the data and creation of a website containing a searchable database and a graphical representation of trials in the dataset.
State of data:
1689 - 1730 limited or no data at present (end of year 3)
1730 - 1810 data needs minor correction and normalization (end of year 1)
1810 - 1837 data needs major work (end of year 2)
"respited larcenies" will likely be included, Simon to consider and decide
Simon will want to add a couple of fields to accommodate links to external sources (images of the original documents etc.)
Continuing some work I started at home this morning, I've added a new feature to the FormState library, so that it also (if desired) saves and reloads the current directories of dialog boxes. This will also be very useful for Transformer, which has lots of dialog boxes, and where users typically want to keep the individual directories they last used for each one of them.
The problem with whole-word-only searching seems to be a function of the TURESearch class which is in the JEDI JCL library. Alongside that class, though, is another unicode implementation of TSearchEngine, named TUTBMSearch (for Unicode Tuned Boyer-Moore). Switching to this class seems to have completely solved the problem.
Now that FindAll is basically working (the only caveats are also applicable to FindNext, and are external to FindAll itself), I found it straightforward to implement the GoToSearchHit routine. The list of KWIC items found in FindAll can now be double-clicked, to jump directly to one of the items, highlighted.