HCMC Blogs

Work on submissions for Issue 6.

On late duty.

Meeting with JS-R and SA to discuss roles and tasks for the Landscapes project, which needs to get its final grant application finished by October.

Working on the schedule and presentations for the Oxford course.

PD and ES of History wanted to get a dump of the 1901 Census. They tried using the Export feature on the site, but all they got was a white, empty window when they executed it. Looks like the number of records they were trying to export (about 46,000) exceed some RAM or processing time limit in php, so the job was never returned, resulting in the white window. I did a query to export all the males, then all the females. Those two exports worked. I then combined the two into one big spreadsheet file.

I then went into phppgadmin and discovered there were 5 records unaccounted for. Those had a value of 9 in the sex field. I then went back to the website GUI and searched for each of those five records and then incorporated them into the spreadsheet.

So, I did get the client what they asked for by a workaround, but didn't precisely identify the cause of the problem, let alone a solution.

1445 page images for CO 305 Vol 19 (in three different sizes) have been added to the collection. These cover the British Columbia 1862: Despatches, Public Offices and Miscellaneous. These will now be linked into the transcription documents.

Thanks for letting me know about the tags, Ashley! I've changed my Archive appropriately.

This week was a nice mix of archive-diving and researching. I spent two days at the 5th Regiment Museum, and one afternoon making contact with the head of the library at the British Columbia Aviation Museum. The bulk of their WWI collection belonged to a local boy, V.R. Pauline, who died in action - they even have his flight cap and goggles, not to mention his diary! Mr. Rollins is going to arrange for me to photograph it all later this week, when the museum caretakers are in. Can't wait!

I've started going through my secondary sources, and I've had to add some new subthemes to reflect the fact that it's just not possible to say everything that needs to be said in 500 words! Is that a hard limit, out of curiosity? I'd hate to have to reduce interesting subjects just to make word count!

This week, I'll be heading to the Ashton Armoury and continuing to work on write-ups. Still waiting to hear back from the Maritime Museum and Fort Rodd Hill. The archivist at Royal Roads should be back in town tomorrow, too, so I'll try to get in touch. When Mr. Rollins gets back to me with a date for photographing that pilot's artifacts, I'll head back to Sidney. Other than that, Mr. Cotter of the 5th Regiment Museum gave me a heap of digitized photographs (including a bunch from the museum's display on Arthur Currie) that I'll add to the archive, and I still have pictures from Special Collections and the museum. They'll all find their way into the archive eventually... sorry for the slowness!! They'll get there, I promise!

See you all tomorrow!

**Kirsten: I've added "5th (BC) Regiment, Canadian Garrison Artillery" and "Civilian Life" as a tag so I will leave you to add those to your sheet.

Thursday and Friday: Spent the morning researching my themes and answering emails and the afternoon in the Sidney Archives. Brad gave me digital copies of all of their WWI material and I've spent some time today picking the best and uploading them to dropbox. This morning Ben and I worked on an excel spreadsheet for the archives to use. I have finalized this with Caroline (Saanich) this afternoon and will send a followup email to all of the archives on Monday.

Have a good weekend!

I've been running the Stanford NER tool against the text of Richard III and analyzing the results. This is part of the preparation for our paper in Nebraska. Sent preliminary results to JJ for discussion. The next stage is to turn Richard III into training data, add a gazetteer, and then run it against Henry VIII.