Scandinavian-Canadian Studies

A new review came in from John, and I marked it up and added it to both versions of the database.

In the metadata rendering for the XHTML output, <biblStruct> elements in the <sourceDesc> tag were not fully rendered. This example shows only "Birgitta Steen" (name of the author whose book is being reviewed), instead of the full title of the article, which also includes the title of the book being reviewed. This may be because the latter is inside a title tag itself.

It turned out this was caused by a combination of factors. First, the processing of the <biblStruct> tag fell through to the bibliography processing code in tei_scancan_xhtml_mla_bibliography.xsl. That code has processing to handle one specific oddity: cases where there is no author or editor, and so the title of a document actually becomes its first component, and its sort key. Such cases were distinguished by wrapping the contents of the title in a <name> tag. I've now added code which distinguishes between that situation (where the only content of a title tag is a name tag), and the situation in the <sourceDesc> for a review, where the <name> tag is only a component of the article title, and is followed by another title tag for the book being reviewed.

All this is a little flimsy, and we should bear this issue in mind for the teiJournal project. I'm coming to the conclusion that the safest way to handle this for teiJournal is to have an inventory of biblStruct types (distinguished by the type attribute), each of which can then have its own distinct processing. This seems redundant, but in fact the rules for formatting are a) almost arbitrary, b) completely dependent on the type of document, and c) catalogued and explained in just such as way in style guides such as Chicago; our processing may as well follow the approach of the style guides it's implementing, and it will certainly be easier to find, diagnose and fix a problem, not to mention add another type with its own peculiar requirements. Finally, explaining to users how to do things will clearly be easier if it's based on the same kind of inventory as they're used to finding in style guides.

1. In the Farfan article, there are reference items which have no publisher or publication place, but because they have a publication date, the <imprint> tag is not empty, so a period is triggered (see line 284 of tei_scancan_xhtml_bibliography.xsl for instance). However, the date has been shifted to after the author, so there's no need for the period. Figure this one out. Perhaps a test on whether the date has been shifted would be appropriate.
2. There are instances of <title level="m"> inside <title level="m">, such as when the title of Hedda Gabler appears within a larger title. In these cases, the surrounding text is probably best left un-italicized, so perhaps we could elaborate that template appropriately.

Got a new document from John, and marked it up. This took a little longer than normal, because it's a long time since I've done any, and because this particular document had a lot of quotes and some messy bibliography stuff. Two markup/rendering problems remain to be solved, which I've posted as a task.

Printed off 30 copies on the ETCL printer.

Installed drivers for the ETCL printer, and did a trial print of the poster on 11x17 paper. Looks good. Printed two copies, and trimmed the whitespace around the edges.

Trish and I completed the handout (8x11) and poster (11x17). We were able to do the handout entirely in Inkscape, exporting to PDF, but for the poster we had to move the doc into Illustrator because we needed to included crop marks (there are bleeds). Eventually got it done -- Illustrator is a pig to work with after Inkscape, and its Help file is unable to open because of some bug.

Pulled the map image out of the cover PDF, and turned it into an SVG vector. Then started building an 11 x 17 poster based on the cover, in Inkscape. I'll finish this tomorrow with Trish.

With input from Trish, create a handout we can distribute explaining the ScanCan project.

Met with John, Trish and Greg to discuss the showcase; we decided that Trish and I will do up a little handout and perhaps a small poster, and handle the presentation itself, because John is very busy. He'll provide us with some introductory material about the journal itself as background.

We also discussed posters and flyers for the Beck lecture series. Greg will do some graphics work to produce some candidate posters.