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HCMC Journal

British Book Trade Index (BBTI) project 2024-12-16 to 2024-12-20

to : Martin Holmes
Minutes: 2100

This is my pro-d project, and is another Endings-inspired rescue project, based on a dataset which was once a relational database at the Bodleian Libraries but was taken down and released instead as a collection of spreadsheets under a Creative Commons license. The plan is to build a static site from it, and in the process further stress-test the staticSearch project, since this dataset is larger than the previous largest dataset we have worked with (the VI Census data).

On Monday, with much consultation with JJ, managed to get a virtually complete and valid TEI rendering of the dataset, from which we can build other things. There are some bits and pieces that require diagnostics and further investigation, and we will need to check that the data we’ve compiled is reality-compliant, but it’s good progress.

On Tuesday, I lost a bunch of time to other project requirements, but I was able to complete the rest of the TEI output, so all the source data is now included; create a diagnostics process with four checks in it; and remediate many problems based on the diagnostic output. I also set up a build job on Jenkins.

On Wednesday, I worked on the HTML output, and got about two-thirds of the way there, finding and fixing lots of minor issues in the data at the same time.

On Thursday, I continued working on the HTML output and validation of it, while also implementing and testing the staticSearch. There’s a lot more to do for both, but progress is steady.

On Friday, in a mad sprint to finish a releasable version, I switched from SCSS to a plain CSS file, did a rudimentary version of the original site layout and added footer info, then added a few more info pages which I hadn’t got around to. The search filters revealed dozens more typos and capitalization errors which I mostly fixed in the source. Then I pushed the site to the new live location at hcmc.uvic.ca/project/bbti.