Landscapes of Injustice

The own_desc field is populated by triggers that run automatically on insert and on update; the latter is working, but the former seems to be only partly functioning, not providing the correct owner id. The RAs are working around this at the moment, but I need to figure it out. They'd also like the same provision to be added to the lawyers table. I can't see what the problem is by comparing the code, though; I'm rather at a loss at the moment.

Meeting with SR re AtoM procedures for ingestion, record structure, etc. etc.

Set up a Mac Book Pro for an RA (users, passwords, Image Magick, jpeg-to-pdf app).

All ready for BC Studies, and the content can be easily re-purposed for CSDH.

Working on my presentation materials for the BC Studies conference, and using the opportunity to look more closely at one or two specific addresses in the directories. We've learned that the 1941 phone directory is only phones (no-one without one appears); while the 1941 zai-kanada directory looks like it should contain everyone. However, the 1941 city directory has a lot of people living in rooms (e.g. at 510 Alexander) who are Japanese but never appear in the zai-kanada, so there's obviously some additional process of selectivity going on. In any case, I've put together the first half of the presentation, mainly illustrated with images, and will finish up tomorrow. Some of the same materials can be re-purposed for the Ottawa presentation.

Went through the spreadsheet updating info on Japanese directories, checking against UBC and Nikkei holdings, and found some more puzzling issues with dating. Wrote to the team to suggest we make some decisions on what to encode after examining the documents. Right now we only have material from a single year.

Added a block of new data to any row in which the previous title was a custodian, providing the info for the title preceding that one; that makes it easier for the stats processing to figure out the sale price excluding what happened with the custodian.

Testing of the Mac version of the jpeg-to-pdf app demonstrated that it was now broken, presumably because of some change to OSX since last May. After much pain and suffering involving getting a fresh version of Platypus installed and doing a lot of testing, we have ended up with a new version of the .app file which works. Lessons learned:

• Platypus settings should include bash as the executor, but check those settings manually; when I just accepted the default, the result was an app which tried to execute bash from inside bash (I think).
• Do the build on a Mac (obviously), and make sure the result is committed to svn from a Mac, otherwise stuff gets broken (the .app is actually a folder, and is treated like one by every other OS).
• Add another zipped version to svn just to be safe.
• Use the Cactus DMG distro of ImageMagick rather than trying to install it from Mac Ports or using binaries.

Began work on preparing for the presentation in May, and started by gathering some screenshots and making a rough plan. In the process, we began to examine the page-images for the community directories, and I think (based on my limited Japanese) that I've discovered a discrepancy; a directory we believed (based on UBC metadata) to be 1939 actually looks to me as though it's dated 1941 (Showa 16). Waiting for some expert help to confirm or dispel this suspicion.

Titles with no dates at all are screwing things up, so the CSV generation now excludes them by default, per JSR.