Mariage

You've done great work on this difficult text, Lauren. To take the questions I can answer in order:

On p. 119, Varin is paraphrasing Plautus, so it isn't a quotation.

I trust you will be able to find the Janus and "franc-taupin" references easily; the latter is in Littré, for example.

On p. 147 I wouldn't consider the Ovid quotation to be part of a new paragraph. The new paragraph would begin with "C'est à dire".

I see the "Annia" reference on p. 145. The important thing here isn't to identify her ("dame romaine" can suffice), but to disentangle her from the allusions to Alceste and Portia. I read the bulk of the paragraph as referring to Portia, though I admit I could be wrong. I'll try to see if such a quote is attributed to her.

Need to know whether it should be rendered in italics, as in English, or in guillemets...

I have just gone through the Varin text again, and there is still a LOT to fix. I think this is the hardest text I've ever worked on, which is slightly unfortunate because it was also the first text I've ever worked on, so I feel like I spent more time than I should have, particularly in the beginning, doing superfluous mark-up. Here are the things still needing to be fixed/questions I have:

• With the said tag, should I turn it into a said who= tag? I have done this for the texts following Varin, but seeing as it was my first text, there were some things I missed out. Is it worth it to go back and put this in?
• p. 119: Varin "cites" Plaute: do I use a quote tag? Varin himself does not use guillemets, I should point out. Also, Varin is citing Plaute in French, not in Latin, which means someone (likely Varin) translated it.
• "Franc-taupin": p. 120, and "tête de Janus", p. 127: I need references.
• Varin often uses italicized exclamation marks for emphasis (I think) I have been using an emph rend=font-style: italic; tag, but I don't believe this is showing up right now in the XSLT. How should I handle this, MH? I really should have asked you first.
• In places where Varin italicizes names (potentially for emphasis?) I went with a hi rend=font-style: italic; tag. Do you have a more accurate suggestion, MH?
• Another thing Varin does is that he centers his phrases quite often (for example, on p. 140). How do I capture this in XML?
• Note to myself: I still need to add notes about the borders around the poems.
• It looks to me that the poems are in fact PART of the paragraph at times, but I cannot include an lg tag inside a p. Suggestions? How accurate do the indentations have to be?
• p. 146: I'm not sure if the Ovid quote is in fact a new paragraph. There are many instances of this in the text.
• I had been putting the p tag before the annotation simply because the text following the ANNOTATION heading is not indented. Is there another way to do this, because I do believe that the p tag is accurate in that it signals a new section after the poem that occurred before the ANNOTATION heading.
• When I am giving a definition of a foreign word like "Fiat" in Latin, should I be using guillemets (question I will email CC about)? If so, MH, which tag is most appropriate? mentioned?

I thought this day would never come! I think the references are now in a place where they can be left for a bit while I revise Varin and finish the mark-up of the Agréments: Most of the references have a write-up, there is no longer plagiarism, and all of the bibliographical sources adhere more or less to the hybrid Laval style (CC, I will email you some of these to make sure that my format is correct and to check that you trust the sources, because for some of the more rarified references, sources were scarce).

Égypte and Thrace have been added as references, and I have also added in the references CC found for me.

So I'm going to 1. Finish proofing the Varin (finally) and 2. Continue my mark-up of the Agréments.

Isembourg and the Agréments still need references. But the good news is that I will definitely know what to do and what not to do now after our "power-revision" of the reference.xml file.

Over the last couple of days, the site has been very flaky because of the eXist indexing problem. We're no nearer to a fix, as the latest messages on the eXist suggest a similar error (index corruption due to failure to store temporary fragments) is still happening in the 1.4 RC. The trouble seems to be triggered by any serious search on the Mariage search page, which does store temporary fragments; in attempting to minimize the scale of these, or the processing required, I tried to add new range indexes this morning, but that borked the whole system again. When Greg comes in, we'll take it down, remove all dbx files except for dom.dbx, symbols.dbx and collections.dbx, restart the db and use the Java admin client to reindex everything.

I've posted a warning on the main page about the search problems.

As you know, there are mythological and historical references that appear in both the Varin and Sonnet de Courval texts (Hercules-Dejanire, Jason-Medea, Tereus-Procne, Eriphyle wife of Amphiaraos, Claudius-Messalina etc. etc.). When you have time Lauren and Leanna, could you please test that the links to each name are working in both texts? Maybe this is another problem with eXist, but I don't think it's only that.

Some links to references seem broken, especially in the Sonnet text: "Déjanire," all of the Procne or "Progné" and Tereus references. "Erifile" (Sonnet p. 17) is the same reference as Eriphile in Varin (and there as well, the first mention, on p. 50, isn't linked to the reference).

A comparison uses of these figures could make a good conference paper for someone.

After working with the eXist 1.4 RC again for a little while, I think it's pretty clear that the admin client has some serious bugs in the index configuration dialog; for one thing, whenever you create an index as "include", it shows up as "exclude" the next time you go to the dialog. Adding indexes and range indexes seems to result in any search queries which use "&=" or "|=" returning nothing at all; at other times, they seem to return results with some items tagged with <exist:match>, and other hits not tagged, which is very flaky.

I think the next step is to determine whether configuring indexes through the configuration files is going to work more reliably. It's possible that this is all caused by the admin client dialog, or by the client's unpredictable interaction with manually-specified indexes in the configuration files. Tomorrow I'll try adding a lot of index settings through config files.

I've also realized that to get the old full-text indexing behaviour, we now have to build eXist with Lucene enabled. This is obviously the first thing to try, because the old-style fulltext behaviour is what we really need to support our legacy projects. I didn't realize this wasn't built in by default, so a lot of our problems may come from that.

The search page on the site seems to have become spectacularly vulnerable to the index corruption we've been experiencing with eXist. It's now almost never actually working properly. In the absence of a stable eXist 1.4 as yet, we're kind of stuck, but this is getting worrying. I may have to work on a Mariage stack that's based on the 1.4 RC to get around the problem. On the 1.4 RC, the search isn't working either yet, but that's due to XQuery changes which I need to get a handle on anyway, so perhaps I should be doing that as a priority. I'll look at it tomorrow.

Noticed some display oddities on the references page on the site, and found that there was an empty <quote> element in the entry for Egypt; this was causing a self-closing <q> tag in the output. Put a comment into the original file as a quick fix, the put in a trap for this in the XSLT, which now generates a comment where a <quote> tag is empty.

Updates:

1. I made Claire's new "Domitia" reference into a note because it is more a commentary on the Varin text than a general note on Domitia the historical figure. I have kept the original reference in the references.xml file, but I commented it out so that it will not show up as on the references page.
2. I have begun incorporating the references Claire has found (list I sent her in May) into the references.xml file as well. A few changes we need to make: "Hyponax" became "Hipponax" in the references file -- this change still needs to be made to the 1621 sonnet xml file. Also, "Marane Espagnol" became "Marrane" -- I do not know what file this shows up in --- I'm thinking that it's one of Emily's? It's not in any of mine.
3. As for the incomplete references, we still have Égypte, Thrace and Indiens to write.
4. I still need to replace some "foreign" tags with "hi rend" ones. I also need to change a few of my bibliographical entries.