Novels in Context: A TEI Database of Primary Resources for Teachers, Students, and Scholars College English Association 2015 Proposal This Fall, I was awarded a sabbatical grant to pursue work in the digital humanities, specifically the creation of a free- and open-source relational database of curated, excerpted, annotated primary source materials useful for the study and …
Github and more
NiC is now available for collaboration on github! What have I learned in the process? Help is essential, first of all. And probably last of all. Otherwise, I did learn a few important things about the github workflow, which was very confusing to me. For those of you who, like me, are new to the tool and are …
Recovering the DB
And so it begins: this is what greeted me when I started eXist after, apparently, mucking about in expathrepo when I wasn't supposed to. What follows is basically a screenshot diary of the recovery process--I'm not sure I really want to revisit it, but perhaps I'll come back and add a narrative later...
No, most definitely not…
Yesterday, I made some progress on displaying file author names in a new column on the front page--figured out how the WORK-TYPES document is called and accessed, how data is retrieved from it, decided it would be better to pull the names directly from the data files, and did it. Sort of. I was running into a problem …
Today a basic display, tomorrow the world?
Thanks in very large part to the patience and availability of a couple of awesome open source developers, I have a basic application that displays the texts in the collection with header info! I haven't started on formatting, searching, exporting, or incorporating the page images, but soon. Also, I learned where to put the .PNG file …
Continue reading "Today a basic display, tomorrow the world?"
A tiny piece of the puzzle
I think I've figured something out that's been eluding me regarding the way that functions get called--I'm still a bit wobbly on the model/map lingo, but it just occurred to me how the different functions are organized and data passed between XQL and HTML files. The main VIEW-WORK.HTML file calls functions defined in APP.XQL, the primary point of entry. …
Starting fresh
I spent almost all day yesterday trying to figure out why one function worked, and what I thought was pretty much an exact duplicate, tweaked to pull different elements, didn't--I was pretty frazzled by the end of it, and I think I need to start fresh today (I did put another call out on the …
“Writing” a first function
Back from Greece, which means, back to the database project! As I've written before, this whole experience is a learning process for me--I'm learning about functions, where they're called, how they hook up with other bits and bobs to display data in specific ways. This should be fairly straightforward, and I'm trying to make it …
Getting by with a little help from sourceforge and twitter
As you can no doubt tell, I don't know a lot about xquery, database applications, or how data is called/manipulated/displayed in eXist--there's a whole host of other "things I don't know" but that I also don't have names for yet. I'll try to explain what I'm doing in laywoman's terms, but if you know what I'm really …
Continue reading "Getting by with a little help from sourceforge and twitter"
Proposals!
It's a real pleasure to get back into writing and researching; administration has its rewards, but I think I'd much rather teach, read, and write about the things that inspire and interest me. Since the sabbatical has technically started, I've been working on my Novels in Context database project, but I've also been working up several proposals …
Tonya Howe 