FrancoToile

Jamie and I met with CC and PS to hammer out a priority list of tasks to complete before CALICO.

By April 20th PS will have
1) fixed 2 or 3 small interface bugs we ID'd
2) completed a basic shell for the map (just a GUI wrapper)
3) tweaked the search results page so it produces thumbnailed links (timestamped) in to each video
4) convert new pages to HTML5
5) embed an HTML5 video player (with Jamie's help)

By April 20th HCMC will produce
1) a basic map displaying all locations of speakers currently in the db, with each location providing a hook in to the search system to provide a list of speakers from that location. It will use OpenLayers and KML to begin with.
2) The "Other videos" panel to the right of the video player panel will be dynamic, providing, at first, a selection of other speakers from the same region as the speaker currently in the video player panel. Other possible categorizations were discussed, but not finalized.

After April 20th we will discuss any leftover issues and decide how to proceed. The goal is to present a mostly feature-complete version at CALICO (May 17-21).

Met couple of times with CC and PSz to discuss GUI for Francotoile. After first meeting, I rewrote some of the DOM in that site to accommodate greater range of possible UIs and in particular the ones we're likely to develop. Created a dev version of the site for PS to play with. By end of second meeting it looked like we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted - at the moment I don't see any additional implications for me to modify code to accommodate that design.

Bug reported:
Search “culture” with no other criteria, one result is Hugues with 7 matches.
Search "culture" with location=Canada, one result is Hugues with 8 matches.
Problem is caused by use of "&=" operator. That exist operator causes the match to be included in the count of matches, which is not what I want. Could rejig a bunch of code so that only the matches on the text are counted, or could use the standard "contains" operator to filter returned nodes without affecting match-count. Latter is easier, so that's what I did.

Example before:

for $result in collection('francotoile/data')
//tei:TEI [tei:text/tei:body[. &= 'culture']]
[tei:teiHeader/tei:profileDesc/tei:particDesc/tei:person/tei:residence[ . &= "Canada"]]
order by text:match-count($result) descending
return ...

Example now:

for $result in collection('francotoile/data')
//tei:TEI [tei:text/tei:body[. &= 'culture']]
[tei:teiHeader/tei:profileDesc/tei:particDesc/tei:person/tei:residence[ contains (., "Canada")]]
order by text:match-count($result) descending
return ...

Thanks to Martin for clarifying this difference between the two operators.

PatS reports that his media player (MoviePlayer) doesn't play the .mov file. Confirmed that on a Linux machine here. We know that really only the quicktime player reliably works, so Linux is out of luck. The planned rewrite of the site will address this known problem. For the purposes of Pat's graphics work, his player is allocating the right amount of screen space (and even a border) for for the media player, so he should be able to do his design work without a working media player.

Meeting at HCMC with Stewart and Pat Szpak, graphic artist. Agreed on what is needed to improve interface of video page: frame around video screen icons to replace/accompany words reframing and centering of video frame to refocus page on video. subtitles will show underneath total work for Pat should take about a full day, I am planing on 50 hours.

Met with SA yesterday to discuss various technical and management issues. SA gave me the name of a graphic artist whom I will contact today. We will also try to install Camstasia on a few macs in the HCMC so that my RA can go work there. Regarding the funds for HCMC, we will wait for specific bills and more specifically I might transfer some of my funds form technical to travel to pay for Stewart to go to EUROCALL where we might present together. EUROCALL next year will be from Aug 31 to Sept 3 in Nottigham, England. If and when necessary one of the RA who is starting his MA will be trained to text encoding and video editing. However this FALL the work consist mainly in transcribing data, getting experiment 2 ready. The technical work will be done by Stewart and Greg at the HCMC. More later.

Met with Catherine C about updates to the Francotoile site. She asked for: - add map-based browse interface - remove duplicate requests to authenticate user - do better job of remembering user configuration (i.e. player is quicktime) - ensure that transcript box always appears to right of video player - allow user to hide/show transcript box - support wildcards (? *) in search, and include instructions to user - include graphical frame around video box and graphical icons on tabs (search, bookmark, transcript, transcript of all, etc.) We'd already talked with Greg N about the map and he felt he could do that. The graphical border and icons would need a graphic artist (maybe 10 hours at most). The other modifications I could make. Also discussed with her that we'll likely port Francotoile from php-based front-end to cocoon-based front-end so that I become more familiar with the latter kind of approach. Drew up a project proposal to submit to the DH committee.

Met with SA yesterday to follow up on changes to site. We agreed on the following: 1. Homepage: have the picture change at every click instead of once a day. I will provide a series of picture (free of copyright) to be used for database. 2. Browse page: a. Use Google map to reorganize the videos. Video would be placed according to the origin of the speaker. A box (activated by a mouse over) would add key info to help users decide whether this is the video they wish to select. 3. Authentication will not be required again once users entered the site. 4. Quick time: once users have selected QuickTime, they do not need to save the preference again. 5. Transcript box: always on the right side. 6. Search page: ease look-up functions. Use the * to allow users to llok for part of a word. explain on page. 7. About page: Cc will write text to be included here, including all the credits, and so on. Will send to SA for revision and inclusion in the site. 8. Video box: will hire a student to work on interface design, box around video, and icons to replace words.

Met with CC on future of FrancoToile, which has just obtained a SSHRC grant.

The single long list of subjects is getting unwieldy. Discussed using a map interface to allow users to select which subject they want to see. We'll probably also create a tabular representation allowing people to sort by various attributes. Map will be based on what Greg's done for GRS - which we're also going to use for Medieval.

She's going to do some useability tests on the search interface, report back and then I'll look into making the search engine a little more sophisticated.

She hopes to have significant enough modifications to present at EUROCALL 2011.

In discussing with Greg and Martin, we're considering a rewrite from the current php-based front-end to a cocoon based front-end.

We'd also like to support more video formats than the current quicktime (e.g. Flash as well).
Once we've got the map going, we can use that interface for more than simply looking people up. We can use it to display the locations of people with specified attributes etc.

Had a hardware failure, so got the XML, RNG, XLS and couple of documentation files from the backup archive and copied them to a new computer for MC. Also gave her a copy for her own computer as she'll be using that too.