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DM News: Digital Medievalist (DM): A new peer-reviewed on-line scholarly journal for technology and medieval studies
by caedmon＠uleth.ca 21 Apr '05

21 Apr '05

A new article has been added to the news section at DigitalMedivalist.org -- Digital Medievalist (DM): A new peer-reviewed on-line scholarly journal for technology and medieval studies To view this article, please follow this link: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news.cfm?n_ID=40

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Digital Medievalist (DM): A new peer-reviewed on-line scholarly journal for technology and medieval studies
by Daniel O'Donnell 21 Apr '05

21 Apr '05

[Apologies for cross posting] I am pleased to announce the publication of the inaugural issue of DM (The Digital Medievalist), a new peer-reviewed on-line journal for technology and medieval studies: <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal.cfm> In this issue: *Guyda ARMSTRONG and Vika ZAFRIN, Towards the electronic Esposizioni: the challenges of the online commentary <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/article.cfm?RecID=1> * Arianna CIULA, Digital palaeography: using the digital representation of medieval script to support palaeographic analysis <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/article.cfm?RecID=2> * Hoyt N. DUGGAN with a contribution by Eugene W. LYMAN, A Progress Report on The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/article.cfm?RecID=3> *Jonathan GREEN, Opening the Illustrated Incunable Short Title Catalog on CD-ROM: an end-user's approach to an essential database <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/article.cfm?RecID=4> *Kevin KIERNAN, The source of the Napier fragment of Alfred's Boethius <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/article.cfm?RecID=5> *Peter ROBINSON, Current issues in making digital editions of medieval texts or, do electronic scholarly editions have a future? <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/article.cfm?RecID=6> * Kathryn WYMER, Why Universal Accessibility Should Matter to the Digital Medievalist <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/article.cfm?RecID=7> Currently DM is published two times per year. The next issue will be published in November 2005. For information on forthcoming articles and future themes, please see the issue leader, <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/article.cfm?RecID=9>. Submission guidelines are available at <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/article.cfm?RecID=8>. The address for editorial correspondence is <digitalmedievalist(a)uleth.ca>. -dan -- Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Tel. (403) 329-2377 Fax. (403) 382-7191 E-mail <daniel.odonnell(a)uleth.ca> Home Page <http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/> The Digital Medievalist Project: <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>

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Remaking the Book
by Yin Liu 14 Apr '05

14 Apr '05

In June 2005, the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, is hosting a symposium entitled ‘Remaking the Book: Digitally Reconstructing the Otto Ege Manuscript Portfolios’. Details can be found on our website: <http://www.usask.ca/english/humanities_computing/>. Anyone who would like more information can also contact me, Yin Liu, at <yin.liu(a)usask.ca>. -- Yin Liu Department of English University of Saskatchewan 9 Campus Drive Saskatoon SK S7N 5A5 Canada (306) 966-1835 yin.liu(a)usask.ca

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Netiquette
by Daniel O'Donnell 13 Apr '05

13 Apr '05

Hi all, Some members of the list asked me over the weekend to announce a policy about posting replies to the list. The issue comes when one indiscriminately copies the entire message to which one is replying. After a couple of iterations, this produces very long messages with very little new content. The length of these messages increases expense for customers using wireless or dial up service. Better practice is to copy only fragments of text to which one is replying, or, if one is replying more generally, summarising the gist of the earlier posting. What we certainly should be avoiding are messages that end with a long appendix of quoted material from the thread. I'm a terrible offender myself, I know, and not all mailers will let you eliminate the copied text (my PDA doesn't seem to allow that for example). But most mail clients do. Thanks. -Dan P.S. To do my bit, I've eliminated that annoying "DM-L" header that prefixed every message... the source of the other complaint this weekend. ;) -- Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Tel. (403) 329-2377 Fax. (403) 382-7191 E-mail <daniel.odonnell(a)uleth.ca> Home Page <http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/> The Digital Medievalist Project: <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>

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RE: [dm-l] Question about CSS and IE
by Binkley, Peter 12 Apr '05

12 Apr '05

Aargh, you're right, I misunderstood the new spec. So the implication is that browsers that don't yet provide CSS support SHOULD provide it, rather than having a default behaviour. Peter Dan wrote: > Looking at the 2.0 standard, I think they are probably doing > a bad job of explaining it: they should be emphasising that > the marks are to be supplied by a stylesheet; given that the > actual marks used to indicate quotations are really > accidental features of typography rather than structural > categories, they should not be encouraging people to put them > into a document as CDATA!

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Digital Sessions at Kalamazoo 2005
by Daniel O'Donnell 12 Apr '05

12 Apr '05

Hi all, I've just reorganised the Wiki entry for the 2005 conference so that it is arranged by date, time, and session title rather than organising body. I've also added speaker information. Here's the link--which if you have a web-usable PDA you might want to consider bookmarking for use at the conference itself: <http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php/Kalamazoo_2005>. If you know of any additional papers and/or sessions, perhaps you would consider adding them to this list? There is one change to note: Advanced Technology in Medieval Scholarship (U.Kentucky) (Session 263) has changed time and location: it is now on Friday at 10:00 am in Schneider 1265 (Schneider is next door to Fetzer). At some point it might be valuable to collect abstracts to these speaker listings. If you are a speaker and have an abstract that you are willing to post, one method of doing so might be to create a new entry for your paper and post the abstract there, adding a link to the listing for your paper in the Kalamazoo 2005 entry. I'll help anybody who needs it, so don't be afraid! The Spring 2006 issue will concentrate (though not exclusively) on papers presented at the Summer 2005 conferences. If you are giving a paper at Kalamazoo or Leeds this year, you might want to consider submitting it next Winter for refereeing. We are waiting for the final proof corrections before the Spring issue of DM is made public. So you should know what you are getting into pretty soon. -dan -- Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Tel. (403) 329-2377 Fax. (403) 382-7191 E-mail <daniel.odonnell(a)uleth.ca> Home Page <http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/> The Digital Medievalist Project: <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>

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RE: [dm-l] Question about CSS and IE
by Binkley, Peter 12 Apr '05

12 Apr '05

I think you're in the grey zone where IE just hasn't implemented generated text in CSS. There may be help in the demo files here: http://www.xhtmlchef.com/stc2004.asp . Also, since the French and Italian quotes work, have you tried q:lang(ENG)? By the way, XHTML 2 seems to be dropping the <q> tag and replacing it with <quote>, which explicitly requires the author and not the browser to provide the quotation marks (http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-xhtml2-20040722/mod-text.html#sec_9.8. ). So I don't suppose we'll see support for CSS-specified quotation marks added to browsers that don't already support them. Peter

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Choosing an XML Editor
by James Cummings 12 Apr '05

12 Apr '05

Dear DM-L Some readers may be interested in an AHDS information paper that we have recently released. It was written by Thijs van den Broek as part of his technical report on the possibilities of Benchmarking XML-editors. http://ahds.ac.uk/creating/information-papers/xml-editors/ It is a highly subjective report and really concerns the perceived usability of the editors by different groups of people. My preferred editors are tei-emacs and oXygen, by the way. -James -- Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk

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Question about CSS and IE
by Daniel O'Donnell 11 Apr '05

11 Apr '05

Hi all, I have a question about Internet Explorer. We are proofing the journal right now, and have discovered that IE doesn't seem to display quotation marks for the html:q tag. To indicate italics, we follow the W3C recommendation and use <q> rather than marks to rend quotations, article titles, and the like. In our CSS, we indicate how those marks are supposed to appear (e.g. when nested). In this specific case, we have --In HTML-- <q>quoted text</q> --In CSS-- q { quotes: “ ” } q q { quotes: ‘ ’ } q q q { quotes: “ ” } q:lang(FRA), q:lang(ITA) { quotes:« »; } (we've also tried: q { quotes: '"' '"' } q q { quotes: "'" "'" } q q q { quotes: '"' '"'; } q:lang(FRA), q:lang(ITA) { quotes:« »; } ) Weirdly, the Italian and French quotes work fine in all browsers; the other q styles work in Opera and Firefox. Any suggestions? -dan -- Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Tel. (403) 329-2377 Fax. (403) 382-7191 E-mail <daniel.odonnell(a)uleth.ca> Home Page <http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/> The Digital Medievalist Project: <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>

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RE: [dm-l] what xslt can't do..?
by Binkley, Peter 11 Apr '05

11 Apr '05

(With apologies to the list for not trimming quoted messages in this exchange). I've just about run out of things I wanted to say on this, but I wanted to respond to a couple of points in Peter R.'s last posting. I've learned a lot from this exchange and thank all Peters and others who have participated, in particular Peter R. for his patient and thoughtful responses. Peter R. wrote: > Still, this is quite a difference from the 'generate static > files to optimize particular views' approach (actually, the > cocoon example Peter B gives seems to be such, and so not > really comparable to what A does). That is indeed what I intended, and I do see it as comparable to Anastasia: a relatively slow and complex pre-processing of the source XML to enable a relatively fast and simple front-end. Whether the pre-processing involves indexing as Anastasia does or chunking and transforming as the theoretical Cocoon-based system would do, doesn't seem to me to be material. They both have to be done, and redone every time the source changes. And I admit that A's pre-processing will be much, much faster than the kind of system I'm imagining. > Under that, you have to figure out in advance just what > particular views you want to enable. And, there can be a > near infinite number of these. But once we're dealing with XML files containing a single page's worth of XML, XSL is back on its home turf, using Xpath to deal with complex parsing of the XML source. Even if the pre-processing did nothing but chunk the TEI into pages, the stylesheet to extract the text of a given witness would be fairly simple. As one of my first XSL projects I hacked a Cocoon-based system to present critical editions for a text I was working on; the underlying format isn't TEI (I didn't know any better at the time and was working with texts I originally transcribed in Nota Bene) and the XSL is far from optimal or bug-free, but it at least shows that this can be done. The prototype is here: http://www.library.ualberta.ca:8080/cocoon/quentin/sp-0prol.html . The number of witnesses is nowhere near 50, but there's rather more than a page of text here (about 70k of xml). Set your options in the menu and click the "Render" button: you can select a base witness, compare two witnesses in parallel columns with differences highlighted, or generate an app. crit. containing variants from selected witnesses. A text with about 50 hexameters and 26 witnesses is here: http://www.library.ualberta.ca:8080/cocoon/quentin/decmet-page.html , about 140k of xml (unfortunately, I apparently never finished adapting the stylesheet for my clumsy verse format, so the app. crit. isn't coming out right - must get around to fixing that). This is still way too slow, but there's lots I know now that I didn't when I last worked on it, and I'm sure I could improve it. Whether the response time would ever approach Anastasia's for complex texts I don't know, but I wouldn't rule it out without trying. (Now, shall we discuss whether Cocoon's XSL-FO support could ever generate a pdf of a critical edition to compare with XeTeX's output ...) <...snip...> > Another problem is the > process chain itself. If your approach means daisychaining > various processes together, and at the end you discover > something wrong, fixing can be a real pain: you have to go > back, figure out which bit of the chain caused the problem > (which can be real hard, when you have complex interactions) > then rerun the whole thing before you can view the result. > With Anastasia the problem is either in the tcl scripts (in > which case, you can fix and see the results instantly) or in > the source xml (which will mean you need to reindex): there > is no somewhere-in-between. Here we're dealing with personal preferences, I think. I find Cocoon's pipeline structure very handy for debugging, since it's easy to inspect the output of every stage of the process: just add label attributes to the pipeline, and then pass those labels on the query string in a field called "cocoon-view". In the prototype mentioned above, you can add "cocoon-view=source", or "step1", or "step2" to the query string to see the source xml or the output of the two intermediate transformations. This is so easy that I often start off by breaking a process into more transformations than is necessary, until I've debugged it. In debugging a TCL script doing the same complex work, you'd presumably set breakpoints to do the same thing. Peter Baker has summed up the lessons I've drawn from this thread very well. My motivation for defending XSL in such tedious detail is that it is my pet technology, which I freely admit is not always a good ground for choosing. But it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand: the main limiting factor on what we can do, at least in my environment, is not processing power or storage space but my development time. XSL is so useful for so many things that I expect I'll get a higher return on the time I invest if I find a way to do things with XSL than if I try to learn a new technology, even if XSL isn't the best possible tool. I'm also, I suspect, operating from different assumptions about what is "good enough" than Peter R. is, since I'm interested in Latin texts, where the range of orthographic variation is much narrower (and less interesting) than in the vernacular texts that Anastasia has been used on. It may well be that an XSL-based system could get an acceptable level of performance for a Latin text that it couldn't match for a vernacular text of comparable length and number of witnesses. My conclusion: I think a system comparable to Anastasia could be built using XSL; if such a system existed, I'd use it in preference to Anastasia because it would fit better with my technology environment; but now that something as good as Anastasia exists and is available under an open-source license, the only real reason to develop such a system would be for the fun of it. Peter Peter Binkley, Ph.D., MLIS Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian Information Technology Services 4-30 Cameron Library University of Alberta Libraries Edmonton, Alberta Canada T6G 2J8 Phone: (780) 492-3743 Fax: (780) 492-9243 e-mail: peter.binkley(a)ualberta.ca

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