HCMC Blogs

Revised computer schedule with additional computer hours for JL project;
LB project

Sorting out audio-visual page.
Received additional requests from BB today re display of multiple photos.
Various choices regarding display available.
Sent email to BB for decision re photos.

Website in progress.

(Working draft of revised event guidelines provided by Lauren.)

1. Not every single thing that happens is an 'event.'

2. Do not include each conversational turn in an extend conversation into separate events.

1. Not event 1 "Odysseus greets Agamemnon," event 2 "Agamemnon greets Odysseus."

3. Do not include extraneous detail in event descriptions.

1. event_14011: "Hera goes to the room built for her by Hephaestus and makes herself look as lovely as possible."

1. why the detail about Hephaestus building the room? If this is important, it should be its own, separate event. If it's not important, don't include it at all.

4. Do not shoehorn events separated from each other in time or space together because they are narratively related.

1. event_14011 above.

1. Hera going into the room, and Hephaestus building the room, are separate events. They are not the same event just because they are mentioned closely together in the text.

5. Put event descriptions into clear, neutral modern English. Do not copy or imitate the archaic phrasing of the translations

1. Some examples of archaic words and phrases best avoided:

1. bid

2. quarrel

6. Avoid unnecessary adjectives and descriptions.

1. event_14012 "Hera lies to Aphrodite and asks if she will help her to procure some potent love charms to settle a quarrel between Rhea and Cronus, when she really intends to use them upon Zeus."

1. "potent" is extraneous.

2. event_14009 "Poseidon looses a fearsome battle cry and raises the morale of the Achaeans."

1. cut "fearsome."

7. Record events, not narrative explanations.

1. see event_14012 above. In general, say what happens, but do not include complicated plot-based explanations of why it's happening. The event above should be restated with something like "Hera gets a love potion from Aphrodite." You do not need to be utterly complete and include every detail from the text. Event descriptions point people to the texts if they want more detail; they do not replace the text.

8. Use standard, academic-writing type English grammar.

1. event_15020 "Poseidon warns Iris that if Zeus spares Troy, himself, Hera, Athena, Hermes and Hephaestus will be very angry."

1. "himself" is not standard here. "He" is usual, but if you want to emphasize that this is Poseidon (and not Zeus) you could write "he himself."

9. With the exception of the weirdness of the CoS, events happen only in one place. This is especially true when the happen in sequence rather than simultaneously.

1. event_15004: "Zeus rescues Hercules from Cos and brings him back to Argos." The place for this event is recorded as CoS, but this seems to also include Argos. The rescue should be separated from the return home.

10. Give preference to an action rather than the speech act which instigates or describes it.

1. event_3119: "Agamemnon commands the Achaeans to purify themselves an offer sacrifice to Apollo."

1. We are not here told whether or not the Achaeans actually did, only that Agamemnon commanded it. This would perhaps be okay if the text were silent on the issue of whether the command was carried out, but it is not.

11. Be careful of using the definite article without a clear antecedent (and event descriptions should generally be so short that there shouldn't be one).

1. e.g. event_14000: "Nestor goes to investigate the sounds of fighting by the ships."

1. Read in isolation "the ships" doesn't make any sense. "the Greek ships" is better.

2. If you need to choose, the description should be of an action taking place, rather than an action about to take place or having just taken place.

1. e.g. event_14000: "Nestor goes to investigate the sounds of fighting by the ships". "Nestor investigates" would be better.

2. Of course, if the antecedents of an event are important, they may be included as their own event. They should not, however, be included instead of the main event.

3. In general, verbs that describe a state of being or a state of mind should not be the focus of an event or an event description.

1. e.g. event_14005: "Agamemnon believes that Zeus has turned on the Achaeans and orders the ships drawn down into the water while the battle rages so that some may have a chance of escape."

Received request from LM for remaining hours to be booked.
Updated research computer schedule with hours for Myths on Maps
project. (LM)
Sent email confirmation to LM, cc'd LB.

Did some prep for tomorrow's meetings with SR from Artefactual.

By the end of today:

• All wrinkles with articles worked out.
• Banner and menu in place.
• AJAX retrieval and display working.
• Footnotes working.
• An ant task to build the entire set is done.

We are running into an issue in Pausanias wherein he frequently references historical personages without sufficient specificity. For example, in 1.55:

"These are the Athenian eponymoi who belong to the ancients. And of later date than these they have tribes named after the following, Attalus the Mysian and Ptolemy the Egyptian."

There are several dynastic leaders by these names, and the scholarly note in our translation states there is no way of knowing which Egyptian king Pausanias is actually referring to. My best guess for now, based on the wording, is that he is referring to the founding patriarchs of their respective dynasties, but this kind of ambiguous name-dropping is a recurring problem and usually occurs without much, if any, context.

This problem is adjacent to the secondary issue of Pausanias contradicting his own information. As an example, this occurs in sections 1.5.3 - 1.5.4, wherein Pausanias goes to some lengths to delineate two different but related figures named Pandion, only to conflate them in the following paragraph by attributing the children of the grandfather to the grandson.

It is possible that this is an issue of content expertise, and that there is scholarly insight available that we simply haven't encountered yet. A potential way of approaching the issues in the interim would be to create new character entries that serve as generalized catchalls: i.e. "Pandion is the name of several legendary kings of Athens; to which one Pausanias refers is uncertain."

A further challenge is the markup and role of groups. Pausanias makes frequent reference to various groups, some of which we already have entries for: e.g. Greeks, Egyptians, Athenians. However, given that those entries were written for use with The Iliad and this text is coming to us from an entirely different time and context, they aren't especially analogous. The question then becomes, do we create new entries for these groups tailored to their different context in Pausanias? If so, how do we want to approach it in terms of reflecting their inherent value shifts, such as changing concepts of national identity?

On late duty, and also on a roll with XSLT on Mariage. :-)

Mariage is my pilot project for the notion of static site-building, and I've started on that work today. I've reconfigured part of the repo to provide a location for developing the code, and written rendering for all the AJAX fragments; I'm now starting on the main documents, beginning with the simplest, articles.

My approach is to take advantage of the HTML5 data- attributes to preserve as much of the original TEI info as possible (source element name, attribute values, etc.), so that I'm not trying to predict what bits I will and won't need for the purposes of styling and interactivity. It's quite straightforward and elegant to do this, and rather a relief to get away from the heavily contingent style of rendering that I've ended up getting used to on projects that pre-date HTML5. No major gotchas so far.