Academic

Greg and I did a substantial rewrite of the paper to get the size down to an acceptable level, and took all the screenshots needed, then built a PDF version. We submitted the text and PDF versions. So that's out of the way for now.

Did more work on the paper, finishing with a ruthless attempt to pare it down -- which only got us to 2200 words. We should leave it for a couple of days now, and come back to it next week. Aim to submit by Friday.

Did most of the background reading and finished the first draft of the paper on "Rescuing old data". The draft is about 2400 words right now, so the main task is to cut it down to 1500 words, and also finish the background reading and tie it in.

Spent the day working on the proposal for a session on "Rescuing old data: Case studies, tools and techniques" for DH2008:

• Continued work on our Virtual Machine, which we plan to offer on CD to attendees. Confirmed that it will run successfully under the free VMWare Server on Windows, then installed various tools such as TACT, WS_FTP, and IE5, to make it a bit more usable.
• Began collecting background reading on the topic.
• Planned the first section, on the Moses project, and wrote half of it.
• Created a broad plan for the second section, on ColDesp.

Doesn't seem like much, but it was a day's work.

With Greg, went through the version of this presentation prepared by Greg and Martin in the summer for the CSC-based audience and extracted bits of it that would be useful for the engl 500 audience and incorporated those into the engl500 version. Greg to review/proof.

Also talked about merging the two into one large documentation with a branching mechanism for presenter to use based on capabilities and interests of audience. E.g. the csc-based presentation has a lot more detail on tei-xml syntax, a section on applying css to an xml DOM and a brief intro of XSLT; the engl-500 presentation has more examples and non-computer-based exercises, ends with a demonstration of CSS and contains very little technical detail on tei-xml syntax and nothing on XSLT.

Spent an our getting ideas together for a presentation on "recovering old data", possibly for DH2008. There's a lot of stuff we can talk about, and lots of projects along these lines over the years.

The objective is to give new faculty very basic skills in creating a web page and confidence to explore further.

Similar to our approach for English 500 markup, we want participants to see how the technology is applied to tasks they are already already doing.

Start with the generic task of characterizing important features in the content and identifying instances of each, emphasizing semantic vs presentation attributes (e.g. name of publication vs italics). Default practical task will be creating a course web-site. Actual page created will be a draft of the home page for such a site. We intend to include creating CSS rules and specifically CSS classes (name of publication vs foreign expression).

Conclusion will take step back and give them advice on what to consider and who to talk to if they plan to create a website, and that as scale of project increases, more sophisticated techniques and technologies are available to address the same basic questions of organization and presentation of material we always start with.

Layout:
Tried creating a web page containing the following features in Kompozer:
side-by-side blocks of text, each with different text-alignment
side-by-side blocks of text, image on left side, text on right side not wrapping around the image
image on left side with text wrapping around it.

I had made such a page in a text editor the day before for Cindy Holder, so had a working example.

The wysiwyg editor in Kompozer could be used by a knowledgeable and careful author to create div-based solutions.
Knowledgeable because you have to manually add the "float" attribute and appropriate value in the Style-editing dialog, so only someone who could do the coding by hand would be able to do it in their interface.
Careful because it is extremely difficult to impossible for Kompozer to know which div in a nested tree of divs the curser is in when the cursor is at the start or end of that nest, so you can get yourself into the situation of not being able to edit structures after having created them.

The wysisyg editor in Kompozer worked more easily with table-based layouts, but I didn't try nested tables.

FTP:
It took me a number of attempts to correctly configure the ftp client in Kompozer (invoked with the "Publish" button on the button bar). Some of the error conditions required me to either edit the document or restart the app before I could attempt publishing again.
settings/web site: http://web.uvic.ca/~sarneil/
settings/publishing server: ftp://unix.uvic.ca/
settings/account name: sarneil
publish/subdirectory: www

After all that, it uploads with file permissions 640 (i.e. invisible to world), so will check to see if that can be modified to something more useful.

Met with Karen Whyte to get clearer idea of what Dean and development office want from 90-minute Humanities part of day tour by 25 retired business and professional people.
- need to find room (CALL predicted to be busy, asked Judy to enquire if classes scheduled for lab B would actually appear that day)
- audience likely figures technology has nothing to do with humanities, so dispel that
- how humanities-type research affects average-joe lives (google, language learning, research on complex records)
- how examples I show can be reapplied to other areas
- how technology supports that research and teaching
- scale and nature of costs

Put together a Web page which links into all the bits of the various sites I need to talk about, and includes optional screenshots in case of a problem with connectivity. Also made notes I can talk from.