Scandinavian-Canadian Studies

Some questions still outstanding with JT.

JT sent over a doc file with a huge number of corrections to one of the files; this took a long time, and there are still lots of questions outstanding, because it looks as though JT was working from an earlier version of the article than the one I have in the db.

Some questions outstanding. I'm up to date with TODOs as of now.

Some questions still outstanding on Thorsen. Also entered long bio for Bunch, and short bio for Blackwell, so all we're missing now is:

• Nordfjord short bio
• Nordfjord long bio

JT is in agreement that we should be using curly quotes and apostrophes throughout, so I've gone through all documents, including old ones, finding and fixing those errors where they occur in the <text> element. I'm not worrying about the <teiHeader>.

Found a simple way to handle in-volume page referencing using a specialized biblScope tag like this:

<biblScope type="thisVolPages" n="coates_1_19"></biblScope>

If the target document is present (meaning we're processing the whole corpuse), this is processed into a page-range; if not, it is ignored. There's a little more work to do for ScanCan, making the page number format comply with Chicago (hundreds omitted if they're the same in start and end page), but as it happens, for this instance in this volume that's irrelevant, because it's 192-204.

There's a huge list of questions outstanding with JT on this one, and also the page refs for the in-volume Coates in the biblio need to be added AFTER our page numbers have been finalized. I thought about writing some XSLT to generate them automatically, but it would be very complicated due to the way the existing biblio entries are processed, so I'm going to leave that for now.

Some issues still outstanding pending responses from JT. Noticed that the absence of a comma in the @reg attribute of an author's name triggers slightly different behaviour when rendering to PDF -- we need to watch out for this!

Received a paper version of the Coates, containing a blend of corrections done already from the doc file, and things which hadn't made it into the doc. Entered these.

We currently seem to have no policy regarding the use of "smart" quotes (curly quotes) in single-quote contexts vs apostrophes. Unicode recommends that apostrophes use the closing single-quote character, but our texts are very disparate in this regard; they mix the straight apostrophe and the single-quote. I've normalized the vol 19 texts to use the curly one, and am waiting for JT to respond on whether we should carry this normalization back into previous volumes. If we need to standardize on the straight quote instead, this regexp should find mostly instances of curly apostrophes: ((\w+’\w+)|(s+’\s+)).

Figured out how to do this, after looking at the other page ref systems I wrote so long ago. This is the deal:

• At the point you want to refer to, you put in an empty <anchor> tag with a unique @id attribute. For instance: <anchor id="coatesReffedFromBlackwell"></anchor>
• At the referring location, you put in a special <biblScope> tag pointing to it with the @n attribute, like this: <biblScope type="localPageRef" n="coatesReffedFromBlackwell"></biblScope>.
• When processing the biblScope, the code will check for the existence of the <anchor> tag. If it's there, it will generate a space, followed by the page number (so that the page number is separated from the preceding text, which in this case, and often, will be a year-of-publication). If there's no <anchor> tag with the correct @id, it does nothing, thus causing no problems when an article is processed into a standalone PDF, outside the context of the main volume.

Since this has happened only once in five volumes, I don't know whether it's worth documenting in the Hit by a Bus category.