HCMC Blogs

Housekeeping work on the journal, and addition of a new section to the Names and Dates chapter to explain @datingMethod and @calendar, per a ticket assigned to me ahead of the next teleconference.

I've written a rendering pathway for document abstracts. The way this works is that, if a primary source document contains an abstract with a TOC in the header, then when you go to the document without any other parameters (i.e. without a page number or a section number), you see the abstract and included TOC; the TOC items are rendered as links into the document. There are still a few tweaks to be worked out (there's no obvious way to get back to the TOC from the sections, once you're inside them, other than the browser's back button), but the idea is sound. Had to edit Stow a bit to tweak the requirements for this.

On late duty.

Fixed three errors reported by a user to LB.

I have some XSLT half-working to produce the property structures we want to use for our queries. In the process of doing this, I've fixed (I think and hope) a little bug in oddbyexample, and extended the odd file a lot. I'm beginning to encounter all sorts of oddities in the DB source data, including annoying notes in code fields, as well as what look like genuine inconsistencies in the data (lots numbered "B", which might or might not be a typo for "8", and so on). All this will help clarify questions for the land title folks next week.

Having stripped down the original Properties db, I've now rebuilt the web interface for it (dev only), and tested it on our HCMC servers (db server and web cluster). I have an XML dump of the db, and I'm going to start building XSLT to generate data conforming to the schema I created last week; that will be the basis of research enquiries, because it will have transformed the title-oriented relational data into property-oriented XML documents.

Talked with Beth after sending her draft of objectives for first six months. She knows of Japanese directory sources, but isn't sure about English - so will contact JSR to see if he's got a good idea, and if not, will get students to spend first week or so canvassing the possibles and then we'll settle.
She confirmed that pre-war Japanese language is tricky, particularly names, so part of the project this summer will be figuring out how advanced one's Japanese needs to be. We may end up doing conventional Japanese by one person and complex Japanese by another (e.g. names, or data in earlier sources vs data in later sources).
Some of the data exists only in analog form, so her student and/or one of the UVic ones will have to spend some time generating image files from those source artefacts.
She also mentioned the Kobayashi Geneology, which is the raw CSV tables of a defunct database, as something we might want to take a look at to see if if provides enough useful info to justify processing it into an XML data structure for use in the project.
She'll update the milestones document and send it back to me.

Medical appointment.