HCMC Journal

MAJW 2023-03-20 to 2023-03-24

20 March 2023 to 24 March 2023: Martin Holmes
Minutes: 120

Met with AB on Wednesday to plan the next phase. Notes from the meeting:

• The first phase of the move to XML will be to convert the personography. That will involve:
  • Dropping the distinction between primary and secondary; women are primary, end of story.
  • Merging any remaining records which are for parallel primary/relative pairs who are the same person (although I think that’s basically done already in the XML).
  • Replacing numeric ids with ids of the form aaaa1, as used in LOI.
  • Retaining the original ids in the records just in case we might use them.
  • Replacing all pointers to old ids with pointers to the new equivalents.
  • Splitting out the personography into distinct files by initial letter, as in LOI.
• Following that, we will convert and standardize the bibliography records; we currently have ids using upper-case abbreviations from the db alongside lower-case ids on modern print sources.
• Once the bibliography is done, it can be extended with new records by the RA, as an introduction to the XML encoding and a way to build out the bibliography.
• Finally, we will need to address the manuscript descriptions, by finalizing the most appropriate level of granularity for the records for each repository. E.g. for TNA, a citation such as The National Archives of the UK (TNA), DL 25/2381, DL 25/2382/2068, and E 40/14957 should consist of empty pointers as far as DL 25 and E 40, with the remaining content hand-coded (with its format constrained by Schematron to enforce house style). The manuscript descriptions we point to need not be detailed, but should wherever possible contain pointers to actual repository resources available online.
• We need to ensure that language data is being pulled from the db and is recorded in the XML correctly (I think it is already).
• We need to design a flexible system for giving credit, which will include:
  • Print and MS sources (TEI @source attribute?)
  • Responsibility assigned to specific people in our personography, for e.g. writing biographies, contributing info and fixes, asserting relationships between people, and making other contributions. We may simply use @resp for this, at least initially, but experience suggests a more flexible system using responsibilitystatements as used in MoEML or LEMDO will be needed.
• We should add details of the SSHRC grant that funded the first phase to the website to make SSHRC happy.
• A number of new features are planned, all of which will need detailed plans before we start on them:
  • An object-ography for tracking possessions/chattels which are associated with people and are passed between them, including books and household objects.
  • Teaching packs.
  • Short summaries of court records.
  • Network maps for relationships.
  • Featured records which include transcriptions.

On Friday, started work on the first phase of this, creating a driver file and a process which builds a map of old ids to new ids, ready for the transformation. We have also split the people into a modern personography and a historical prosopography, to make our lives a bit simpler. In addition, created a .htaccess file to redirect people from the old project/majw URL to the new subdomain, but this doesn’t work for some reason; LW is looking into it.