HCMC Blogs

Only me to stay late this week -- I'll be running over to keep the office open till 4.30 every day.

I'd previously removed commas in inline citations to comply with Chicago, in the part of the text I've marked up so far; went back and replaced them, to comply with APA.

As part of Paul Scifleet's survey of markup practices, in which we are participating, he's now conducting follow-up interviews; he interviewed me over Skype. He'll bepresenting preliminary findings at the TEI meeting in November.

Just heard from the editors that the board have decided to go with APA style for the online journal, so work done so far towards Chicago will have to be redone. First I have to get an APA style guide, then I'll have to re-edit some of the document I've already worked on, to undo changes I made to conform to Chicago (such as deleting commas between author and date in inline citations). Differences don't appear to be major, but they'll need some thought. This will delay us a bit.

Refined the previous approach a little more when working on the trestle image:

1. Converted to RGB.
2. Checked Keep Transparency in the Layers dialog for the main layer.
3. Added a transparent layer.
4. [Possibly not needed] Merged the layers down.
5. [Possibly not needed] Checked Keep Transparency in the Layers dialog for the main layer again.
6. Tools / Selection Tools / By Color Select.
7. Set to Antialiasing, and set the Threshold to 15.0.
8. Clicked on a white area. This selected all similar colours.
9. Cut the selected areas out, leaving them transparent.
10. Added a layer mask to the main layer.
11. Selected a rectangle at the bottom of the image.
12. Added a black-white gradient fill to the selected rectangle, to fade out the bottom of the image.

Found a better approach to this particular image, using the GIMP:

1. Converted to RGB.
2. Tools / Selection Tools / By Color Select.
3. Set to Antialiasing, and set the Threshold to 15.0.
4. Clicked on a white area. This selected all similar colours.
5. Set the foreground colour to the background colour for the sidebar.
6. Pasted that colour into the selection, filling all white areas with it.
7. Copy/pasted the bottom half of the image from a clean grayscale copy over the new image, to restore white shades to the bottom half of the image.

This seems to be a cleaner way of cutting out the skyline from an image such as this one, with complicated frameworks (like crane arms) extending into the sky. Still experimenting, though...

Added 5.png, after backing up the previous one with the same filename. This time the base image wasn't going to be easy to cut out, so I faded the edges in a vignette manner by:

1. Converting the background to a layer (new layer from background)
2. Adding a transparent layer
3. Selecting an elipse
4. Inverting the selection
5. Feathering the ellipse at 10px
6. Cutting (Control + X)

Hardly a great effect, but it'll do till Greg gets back and can do more work on the site.

Early decisions:

• Where acronyms appear in the text, they might appear in two forms simultaneously, if the authors have provided an inline expansion: with the <expan> first, followed by the <abbr>, or vice versa. In either case, the only one that should be marked up is the <abbr>, and it should be done as a <choice> tag:

  <choice><abbr>SLA</abbr><expan>Second Language Acquisition</expan></choice>
  

  Subsequent instances of the abbreviation can be marked simply with an <abbr> tag, and the XSLT can then retrieve the expansion as required from wherever it occurs in the document.
• Quotes will be rendered like this:

  <cit><quote>“a growing body of research indicating that mechanical drills do not facilitate the development of explicit or implicit knowledge”</quote> <ref target="#aski_2005">(Aski, 2005, p. 333)</ref></cit>
  

  However, it's not yet clear whether the original quotes should be left in place or not; awaiting editorial decisions on this.
• Where a quotation appears without any associated reference (because the reference is elsewhere in the text, or implied), the reference is supplied in an empty ref tag:

  
  ...finding themselves in the familiar position of having to <cit><quote>"constantly reevaluate their services to meet the changing needs of their service population"</quote><ref target="#farkas_2007"></ref></cit> and continuing in the struggle to <cit><quote>"define themselves as more than a repository for books"</quote><ref target="#farkas_2007"></ref></cit>, ...
  

  This enables all quotes to be linked to a reference.

One made during this markup: When an item has no author or editor under which to list it, the <title> element will have a child <name> element which will be detected by the XSLT; the XSLT will then use that as the initial part of the entry.

Went through Simon's requests and clarifications and significantly modified the table structure in the database. I still have a number of instances which don't fit in the structure so will need to talk with him about those.

Spent a while talking with Clifton about optimal way to implement 0 to N relationships where virtually all the records have 0 or 1 pointers. We eventually settled on varchar field with comma-delimited ints rather than hugely long subsidiary tables or intermediary tables between e.g. trials and pardons tables. Will add a "case" field to the trials table to accommodate more than one person being tried for the same crime.