Scandinavian-Canadian Studies

Following the change which removed angle brackets from URLs, email addresses and links, some vol 15 articles (Woods and Christensen) were left with periods obviously missing in author bios (and in one textual note in Woods). Added these, after consultation with John.

This brought up the issue of how to encode them. The obvious place is the <revisionDesc> tag, but mostly these already have items noting the start of markup and pre-publication revisions. Decided to use <item> tags in <revisionDesc>, but to mark them with an n attribute, numbered sequentially, so that any <item> tags which have an n attribute should be harvested for a Corrigenda page.

As discussed in emails April 23, create a page to show revisions to documents subsequent to the print edition.

See email from John 23/4/07. Add periods as discussed, and update/create revisionDesc section for changed files.

Working with the volume PDF output, I found I wanted to get to the TOC easily, and there was no PDF bookmark for it. Added a bookmark in the file tei_scancan_pdf_bookmarks.xsl. The code in this file is not standard XSL:FO; it's proprietary to XEP.

As we now have a number of pieces nearly ready for volume 16, I began setting up the build process. I cloned the volume 15 file, and then gave both 15 and 16 unique id attributes on the root (15 was simply id="master"). I XIncluded the articles we already have, and then tweaked all the metadata to set it up for volume 16. Wrote to John to find out if any of the metadata needs to change for this volume (editorial board membership, for instance).

Spent the morning working on some remaining biblio issues that were minor but difficult to fix:

• The format of the "last access" date did not follow Chicago style (in brackets, in US MMM d, YYYY, following the URL. I fixed this. In the process I had to write a template for converting a TEI date format to this rendering.
• Chicago draws a distinction between "public documents" available online, and regular articles on the Web. The former should be unitalicized and unquoted; the latter are quoted. The former are basically, it seems to me, monographical, so I've always marked them up as <title level="m">, so they were being italicized; I'm now marking them with an additional type="WWW_public_document", and the XSLT code takes account of this and renders them without italicization.
• Analytics with no date (e.g. a Wikipedia article with no author, date or monograph/imprint info) were ending up with an extra period after the "author" name (in this case Wikipedia). It took a while to figure out where this was coming from, but once I'd found it, I was able to eliminate it with a test for the existence of the date tag.

All these fixes were then ported over to the XHTML codebase.

As far as I'm aware, we now have no outstanding issues with regard to bibliography rendering.

Following JT's decision (email on April 3), I've now removed the angle brackets that wrapped all URLs in the PDF output. This has one consequence we should be aware of: although Vol 15 contained no URLs in bibliography lists, there were a couple of articles (Poole and Woods) with URLs in the text, and the online PDF versions of those articles now differ from the print version in that they no longer have those angle brackets. Since this is not a change to the underlying article markup, it's not a revision in the customary sense, so I don't see that we need to document it (other than here).

XHTML output was not affected because it did not use angle brackets anyway.

Bibliography entries for online resources use a crdate attribute for the creation date of the pointer, on the <xptr> tag. I basically repurposed this as the last-accessed date for the resource (on the basis that I check all URLs when I create the pointer tag, so it's not really tag abuse). There's no such attribute for the P5 <ptr> tag, so we had to find another way to preserve that information in the P5 conversion code which produces the XML version accessible on the Website. This is what I've done (at the end of the template for handling <xptr> tags):

<xsl:if test="@crdate">
  <xsl:comment>Last accessed date: <xsl:value-of select="@crdate" /></xsl:comment>
  <xsl:element name="date">
    <xsl:attribute name="type">accessDate</xsl:attribute>
    <xsl:attribute name="notAfter"><xsl:value-of select="@crdate" /></xsl:attribute>
  </xsl:element>
 </xsl:if>

This is based on a suggestion from Lou Burnard on the TEI list, when I raised this issue in February.

It's now complete except for the French version of the abstract.

Short and long bio, along with email info, now makes this paper complete.