Mariage

I've made the following changes this morning:

• The Table of Contents has smaller text, making room for two new columns (Date and Author).
• The new columns, like the old ones, are now click-sortable.
• Fixed the original document title header in the table, which was in English ("Title"), and is now "Titre".
• Made the date column append a question mark to the date when it's uncertain, and show the date range as a tooltip when you mouse over it.
• Titles in the list are now linked directly to the HTML rendering.
• Teasers now show up when you mouse over the title, and disappear when you mouse away.
• The links to XML and Text views of documents now appear in the XHTML view of the document.

Some slight inconsistencies are revealed by the new layout, which in the case of text documents, Leanna and Lauren could fix; for image markup, I'll make changes on CC's instructions:

1. Some documents have no author. That's because they have no <reg> element in the author name -- example from Candale 1:

              <sourceDesc>
                   <biblStruct>
                      <monogr>
                         <author>
                           <name>anonyme.
                           </name>
                         </author>
   [...]
   

   Actually we need to do two things here: standardize the form on "Anon.", and include it in a <reg> tag as well:

              <sourceDesc>
                   <biblStruct>
                      <monogr>
                         <author>
                           <name>Anon.
                             <reg>Anon.
                             </reg>
                           </name>
                         </author>
   

2. Two documents have no date (Opérateur céphalique and Le taste-poule). Claire, if you can give me approximate or exact dates for those, I can add them.
3. The Sonnet de Courval texts have the same regularized form for the name as the non-reg form:

   <name>Sonnet de Courval, Thomas <reg> Thomas Sonnet de Courval</reg></name>
   

   I think it should be:

   <name>Sonnet de Courval, Thomas <reg>de Courval, Thomas Sonnet</reg></name>
   

   or maybe:

   <name>Sonnet de Courval, Thomas <reg>Courval, Thomas Sonnet de</reg></name>
   

   Claire, which do you prefer? (In both cases, it should sort according to the C, when I've got the sorting thing working properly.)
4. Some names are inconsistently rendered (Le Pautre in one document, versus Lepautre in another).

After much struggle, finally got a working eXist 1.4 up on the server, and so far so good: uploads/indexing are going very quickly, and the site seems to be working perfectly without the need for all the re-indexing we had to do before. I found a bug immediately in my code which creates id attributes for page-breaks: there was an <fw> tag with no content, which tripped up my function for creating an id. That's now fixed.

I also noticed that footnote popups and reference popups were typically on top of each other, so I've moved the footnote popup down the page a bit. We should also add a close button to both of those.

Finally, I've made the menu position: fixed, because I was getting sick of scrolling back up the page to get to it...

I just finished my touch-up the Fantastique and Purgatoire texts. Mainly, my job was just to include all of CC's footnotes, but I made some other (very minor) formatting changes, going from the updated Word documents of the two texts she sent in October. First off, concerning the Fantastique:

• I added the <figDesc> that CC had on her transcription of the title page.
• I added in the "S. l. n. d. In-8." that came below the title, but I wasn't sure how to mark it up (because I don't exactly know 100% what it is!!), so I put it for now as a <!--->.
• In note 4, there is some italicized text, but I'm not sure why it's italicized -- I used <soCalled> and <mentioned> tags where I deemed it appropriate given the context, but I'm still not 100% sure. I also forget at the moment if these produce guillemets or if they make the text italic in the way that the <foreign> tag has been programmed to in the schema. I will do a search in the site and hopefully I'll get some answers. If <soCalled> and <mentioned> tags DO produce guillemets, how should I mark up these italicized words? (I think this is a question for MH).
• I also changed the page number format according to current practice (MH and I discussed this a few weeks ago). There were no <fw type="pageNum"> tags -- instead, only <pb n="(x)"> tags, which MH explained were problematic in that the "actual" page numbers can be a bit of a grey area, so we've been marking simply <pb/> to signify a page break and then the page number itself is a part of <fw> (formworks). So I changed this in the Fantastique.

And as for the Purgatoire...

• I added in CC's <figDesc>, as for the Fantastique.
• I also changed the <pb n="(x)"> to the combination of <pb/> and <fw type="pageNum" place="top-(left or right)" rend="float: (left or right)">.
• I added in the docDate in roman numerals, as shown on CC's recent transcription, but there's also this "In-8" after it and once again, I ended up using <!---> because I'm not sure what it is!
• QUESTION: If there's a note within one of these works that's attributing information to a source, e.g. Virgil's Aeneid, would I mark this up as a <title level="m"> since it involves bibliographical information? This is what I have done in the Purgatoire.
• Once again, I'm not sure if the <mentioned> and <slCalled> tags I'm using are appropriate. MH, I think I might need you to check this in both texts.
• I also italicized the bibliographical attributions that were within the text itself (e.g. the anonymous author puts books by Saint Basil in brackets after certain things he/she says) -- I marked these up also as <title level="m"> because I consider them to be bibliographical information again.
• This becomes a problem, potentially, when it comes to books from the Bible italicized in the mark-up, as the author italicizes them in the text (according to CC's transcription). MH, I remember our conversation about not italicizing books from the Bible in regular circumstances, but I marked these up as <title level="m">s as well due to their italicization in the transcription.

... thoughts? suggestions?

Converted my project to a runnable application (not easy -- had to manually edit manifest.mf, specify the main class, etc.; best to start with a Java app target if that's what you want to end up with). Now it will zip and return the size of a string on the command line; I'll add NCD from the command line next.

I've now marked up five pages of Corps des époux, and encountered more new features to document:

• The text requires linking to specific locations in texts in the anthology; in the cases I met today, these were page references inside Choliere (which is still not really in a state to be up on the server -- that's another matter). There was no way of doing this, but I've created one today: ever <fw> tag which is @type="pageNum" or @type="folioNum" generates an XHTML @id attribute generated from its content, so you can now write a link like this:

  <ref target="xhtml.xq?id=choliere#p_82">

  to link to page 82 of the Choliere. This will only work if there is such an <fw> tag in the XML, and in cases where there are duplicate page numbers (as in the Amboise), only the first instance will get an id. Older and smaller documents that don't have explicit <fw> tags usually have a <pb n="xx> formulation, and these will not get ids and not be linkable. It may be that we therefore want to go back and mark up those documents appropriately; but if they're short it doesn't really matter, and if they're long, they're most likely going to get reworked anyway.
• Blockquotes are common and some have biblio references at the end of them:

            <cit rend="block">
              <quote>
                Si toutes nos fringuantes, qui ont si grande envie de sçavoir aux despens de leur pucellage que c’est de s’acoupler avec le masle, estoient assubietties à la rigueur d’une telle loy … i’en tiens la plus-part si doüillettes qu’elles aimeroient mieux estre filles toute leur vie, qu’avec une si mal plaisante ceremonie commencer leurs nopçages… 
              </quote>
              <bibl>(<ref target="xhtml.xq?id=choliere#p_83">p. 83</ref>)</bibl>
            </cit>
            
  

We also have a potential collision between our editorial notes and footnotes in original texts (the Cabinet Satyrique is the main case). After some discussion, I've changed editorial notes so that they show up looking like little buttons, leading to a popup, whereas original footnotes should be encoded in-place, as they originally looked (at the bottom of the page where they appear). The Fantastique Repentir will be the test case for this.

Changes haven't yet been migrated to the server, because it's a bit fragile; I have a brand-new stack for Mariage built with 1.4 stable, with a couple of extra tweaks, which I'm planning to deploy on Monday.

The eXist db now seems to require a full re-index whenever you upload files into it; they don't get properly indexed just through the upload process. My guess is that this is because we actually deployed a pre-release version, and there were some tweaks after it was fully released. My plan now is to build a new version with the Cocoon/eXist package I built on Monday for MJ, test that locally and then replace the server copy with it. I also want to make a further change to conf.xml, through my build script, as follows:

<db-connection cacheSize="48M" collectionCache="24M" database="native"
        files="webapp/WEB-INF/data" pageSize="4096" nodesBuffer="-1">

becomes

<db-connection cacheSize="48M" collectionCache="24M" database="native"
        files="webapp/WEB-INF/data" pageSize="4096" nodesBuffer="1000">

With the setting at -1, the system consumes all available memory when doing indexing; with it set to 1000, it keeps only 1000 nodes in memory at a time, leaving memory free for other threads.

I now have a Java class working and tested which can do the NCD calculations. I may wrap it in a larger class which can also do all the normalizations, for clarity. The testing has revealed some interesting aspects of the USM which bear on the question of "What is similarity?", or better, what on earth could constitute an objective measure of the similarity of two pieces of text. If you take one piece of text and compare it with another which consists of dozens of copies of itself, the similarity is very high (because of the repetition, which is sort of factored out by the compression); in one sense, this is true (they are very similar), but in another, it's not (they're of radically different lengths).