HCMC Blogs

Moodle meeting ran over by quite a long time, so I couldn't get out of the office on time.

Pulled the map image out of the cover PDF, and turned it into an SVG vector. Then started building an 11 x 17 poster based on the cover, in Inkscape. I'll finish this tomorrow with Trish.

I have started work on the viewer search function. This is not the lamented "quick find" but a full search of all metadata fields. The actual searcher is crude so far - it just finds the entered word anywhere - but will become more sophisticated. Ideally the user will be able to search any metadata field using Boolean operators, regular expressions, and other goodies.

Displaying the search results is tricky. At the moment the search just causes the tree icons for found Objects to change to indicate that Object matches the search criteria. There will also be a grid of search results (with KWIC?) and a "next match/prior match" set of buttons to move through the matches. In principle the Object tree could also be filtered to show only matching Objects.

With Scott and Greg, went to the IT Working Group meeting on Moodle.

We have a set of sample documents ready for use in the teiJournal project here. However, a number of issues remain to be resolved with regard to the exact details of the markup practice:

1. There is too much duplication, especially of author and title information. It should be possible to limit this, perhaps by eliminating some elements, or (better, perhaps) by using XInclude to automatically include information from the formally-structured <biblStruct> element in the header into the main header <titleStmt> and into the document's <front> tag.
2. There are some unresolved issues with regard to marking up quotations. Where a quote is followed immediately by a reference, they can be enclosed neatly in a <cit> tag, but when the reference information is introduced discursively in the text, it's harder to tie the quote to its reference. We need to investigate ways to do this, using attributes and ids, then write formal instructions for it.
3. There should also be a way to tie a <bibl> tag to the full <biblStruct> tag in the bibliography.
4. We need to look at how to formalize the classCode system, and then XInclude that information into the header of each document.
5. Running titles must be allowed for, but it's not clear exactly how we should do it. The best approach might be to use the type attribute to supply other title types in the <biblStruct>.

Created a set of documents covering all the major document types outlined here, drawn from these sources:

• ACH/ALLC 2005 Abstracts (by XSLT conversion). We now have a pretty good start on doing a full P5 conversion of these documents.
• ScanCan, by XSLT conversion.
• EMLS (for types such as Note, Editorial etc.), by manual markup.
• Pure invention (for types such as Announcement, Advertisement and Corrigendum).
• New markup of existing texts (for Fiction and Poetry).

We now have a document set that can be used to refine the detailed instructions for markup. Added a task for the next stage.

The document set is here, and the schema is here.