July 17, 2014

New computers: If you are on a computer that does not automatically give you “Digital Scholarship Group” as an option to select when you are logging on, the username should be dsg and the password remains the same.

New list on Trello: To track projects in need of completion (what Julia described as “concrete tasks that need doing”), I have added a new list on Trello, to the far left. Each project will have a card, just as texts do, with the details of what the project requires. You can assign yourself to projects in the same way you do with texts (by adding yourself as a member to that card and changing the label). I’ve designated purple as the “project is claimed” color label and yellow for unclaimed projects. You can also use the comments and checklist functions to track your progress on projects.

Idealized page numbers (for the last time, I promise!): After careful consideration, we have confirmed the decision that we will no longer record idealized page numbers. Please note that we will not be removing them from previously encoded documents. We will also be using the report Syd generated to fix the errors it has revealed in previously encoded texts. This project is available to anyone who is interested in it and can be claimed on Trello using the process described above.

Encoding questions: We had some very interesting discussions about encoding linked <said> elements and concluded that it should be sufficient to use just the next attribute (not both next and prev) to accommodate cases where you have to break up a single speech instance that spans multiple elements in a way that would cause an error. Sarah Stanley and I will be revising our documentation to reflect this change and to more clearly explain when it is necessary to link <said> elements, so I will send out a link to the updated documentation when it’s complete. If you have any questions about how to handle direct speech, just let me know.

We also discussed how to best encode phrases like “Mr and Mrs Smith” – see Syd’s post below for more details.

From Syd:

On the question of

 <persName>Mr.</persName> and <persName>Mrs. Smith</persName>

vs

 <persName>Mr. and Mrs. Smith</persName>

I had suggested that we should look into what current practice is. I also said that *if we were keying* names, I would definitely vote for the former. As we're not, I lean a bit towards the latter, but like the idea of using the former to prepare for keying names :-)

Anyway, I asserted (correctly) that we do both. But it turns out we don't seem to do either very much. There are a total of 79 <persName>s that have content of "Mr.", "Mr", "M.", or "M". (And those last two may not be short for "mister" -- only 63 of the former two.) Note that some of these may not be followed by "and <persName>Mrs....".

We have *lots* of <persName>s with the words "and" or an "&" in the content. But on eyeballing them, the majority look like they are publishers or from cast lists. There are only ~40 that look like "Mr. and Mrs. Smith".

So I don't think past practice needs to influence our thinking on this much at all.