HCMC Blogs

February 6, 2017

TCCD: massaging wikipedia page into personography entries

Posted by on 06 Feb 2017 in Activity log

The 20th parliament was missed in the personography research, but all the key data is in wikipedia, so I'm massaging it into the personography using some XSLT. This is going to take some attention to eliminate duplicate people, but other than that it appears to be straightforward. Still talking to DH about what exactly is in the personography -- it now appears it's everyone, not just speakers in the key debates -- and if so, I have no idea what all the business about different debates was all about.

Rethinking and reworking the search

Posted by on 06 Feb 2017 in Activity log

Spent a lot of time working on the search today, and ended up making it much simpler:

  • We don't need an AJAX option; just appending #search_results to the form/@action param gives you the effect you want when moving between pages. All AJAX stuff now removed.
  • We don't need a "search for" option; it's better to have a more refined "search in" dropdown, allowing you to search the personography or the bibliography etc.
  • We have some remaining problems with what to actually search. We will need to make a distinction between document content and the peripheral lists of other related documents. At the moment, this distinction is not adequately made across the different document types. There needs to be a single div which is isolated from the peripheral stuff which contains the content which is at the heart of the document, and unique to it, and that's what needs to be searched. That'll take a reworking of the static site output.
  • I've added a tiny site option for MoEML, because it was taking ridiculous amounts of time to build and deploy the full app. It's very crude at the moment, but I should be able to refine it over time so it covers most of what we need.
  • There's some anomalous behaviour with the exist indexing of meta elements in the header; the search should pull back only (for instance) tags with @name="dcterms.title", but it seems to be retrieving others nearby. That could be caused by corrupted indexes due to an incomplete uninstall of the webapp.

Web co-ordinators committee meeting

Posted by on 06 Feb 2017 in Activity log

1) Case study was Nursing: communications people are still big on access for potential students above all. They're tending towards a "program-based" vs "category of student based" primary structure.
2) All cascade sites now interact with Google Analytics, so if you get an account with Google Analytics webcoor (EK) will provide access to the UVic stats for that google account.
3) DUIT (Department Unit Implementation Team) currently working with Humanities departments.
4) Brainstorming on features/issues to think about for 2018 rewrite of templates.
- if retention is an issue, think of issues for that specific audience (i.e. as distinct from potential students)
- university-wide alerts and notices work, but no similar mechanism at departmental level - news posts in right column seen as time-sensitive, but ephemeral rather than urgent
- more, and more flexible, boilerplate blocks for info common across depts/programs
- beware being too "mobile friendly" to the point of crippled sites on computers
- audience split between "images are necesssary" and "images are in the way"

skype with Sherri on review of holdings

Posted by on 06 Feb 2017 in Activity log

Talked with SK about five major individuals :
Kagetsu (Logging), Kimura (fishing & committee), Saito (shoolmaster), Tonomura (business), Nakatani (?fishing)
She's put in for one big grant and one small grant to pay for work on these in addition to what the LofI can pay for.
Also, worth a look through the Campbell fonds to see if there are documents there that provide individual details esp. on chattels

She's also directing two UVic students in a course to go through the protest letters and identify dramatic stories or recurrent themes that might inform future work on products for the project.

February 3, 2017