Archive for Uncategorized
May 19, 2010 at 12:09 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Having worked for quite a while on creating the new VTO2 website I sent it around a while ago to my supervisors to see what they thought. Imagine my disappointment when one of them replied that they couldn’t get the fancy AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) search engine to work. I double checked everything and couldn’t for the life of me figure out why it wasn’t working on her machine. I don’t remember how I realised it but it became apparent that when she had typed a search pattern in she then pressed ‘enter’ / ‘return’. This was bit of a ‘duh’ moment for me. I had myself been so fascinated by the AJAX LiveSearch abilities that I had managed to create that I hadn’t stopped to think that one of the first reactions most people will have to a search-box is most naturally to press ‘enter’.
So I searched the web far and wide and came up with no solution. I then decided to make sure that when ‘enter’ submitted the form it just went back to the same page allowing the user to begin again. I then added a request below asking that the user did not press ‘enter’ while doing a search.
But then today while I was moving the whole website to a new (and yeah – much faster) server it struck me to search for “ajax deactivate enter”. Up came this post about “Disable form submit on enter keypress” written by Slobodan Kovacevic in 2005.
I did as he suggests and ‘hey presto’ it worked in Firefox, Safari and I presume IE (although I haven’t checked this yet). I was amazed because normally when I have small but very significant issues like that it takes ages to find the answer. But not this time.
February 26, 2010 at 11:49 am · Filed under Uncategorized
As a follow up on Mondays post on the introduction, I will explore the background a bit more.
We are still looking at the book “Writing the winning thesis or dissertation: a step-by-step guide” (Glatthorn & Joyner: 2005).
The book has a really helpful way of defining the background of the study from 4 different perspectives:
- Societal background
- Intellectual background
- Professional background
- Research background
I used this way of defining the background and made a mindmap. This has really helped me to define the influences that this thesis is built upon.
July 13, 2009 at 7:27 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
These last two days I have been at the first InterFace 2009 symposium. I produced a poster for the first time ever and I believe it went down quite well.
Prof. Willard McCarty
The first key-note speaker Professor Willard McCarty did a very interesting and provoking speech about there being “no end to our wanderings in computer world” simply because computers feed a hunger for the new, under the heading “cutting-edginess”. He was interested in the act of creation among academics rather than what they are creating and he is writing “A History of Literary Computing” focusing the motivation behind the researchers who worked in this field.
McCarty also discussed the nature of collaborations between humanities and technology and between junior and senior researchers. He talked about humanities having a “penis-envy” of the sciences and whether this would stand in the way of collaboration between the two fields. He also questioned whether lack of social and professional equality between senior and junior researchers is standing in the way of true collaboration within research teams.
Prof. Dame Wendy Hall
I found the second key-note speaker Professor Dame Wendy Hall very inspirational. She has just been elected fellow of the Royal Society and was rushing of after her speech to be signed in.
Hall talked about her early motivations (Sebastian Rahtz, Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart) for taking an interest in computing in the humanities, after which she showed a clip from the 1987 film “Hyperland” by Douglas Adams.
Hall has a variety of really interesting stories about Tim Berners-Lee and the invention of the World-Wide-Web and about how search engines (i.e. Google) and the web are interlinked. The WWW was first intended to work as a series of interlinked hyper-documents. However, search engines give us much more freedom and independence from links. If Google stopped working, Hall said, the Web would probably collapse. This is an interesting point in light of the slowing of the Web and Google failing when the news of Micheal Jackson’s death came out, not that I noticed this at the time.
A very interesting point which I had never thought about was that nobody owns the WWW. It could just disappear tomorrow. The WWW has become such a big part of our lives in the last 5-10 years and now it is always my first port of call for anything. But we don’t truely understand it. For this people like Hall and Berners-Lee are setting up the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) to “understand what the Web is”, “engineer it’s future” and “ensure it’s social benefit”.
Innovative Symposium
The InterFace symposium itself was really interesting. About a third of the people there I already knew or had met before. This was the people who’s work generally borderlines humanities and technology. But there was another two thirds of pure humanities and pure technology people who I would never have met it was not for this symposium. A great feature was the “speed-dating” session. Though tiring, I did get a quick view of what different people’s where working on and it brought about some interesting discussions later.
The lightning talks (3 min pitch about your research) was a great idea, but should have been done at the beginning of the symposium, not at the end.
TEI workshop
On Thursday afternoon I went to a workshop about TEI with Dr. Arianna Ciula and Sebastian Rahtz. My only experience of TEI so far has been through EpiDoc but this workshop gave a good understanding of it. However, I will agree with Ciula’s own comment that it would have been nice to be able to do something practical during the workshop.
All in all an interesting and inspirational couple of days and I will definitely be finding my way to next years InterFace2010 if that is what it will be called.
July 10, 2009 at 4:41 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I went to the Digital Humanities conference at University of Maryland a couple of weeks ago. I know this is a bit late to be blogging about it but then I am not always the fastest or most active blogger in the world. I simply forget.
One of the main things I learn’t at the conference was that wow, has twitter just taken of. The amount of twits about the conference was quite amazing. I must admit that I am still not sure that twittering will really work for me.
Someone told me that during my talk several people where actually twittering about it so of course I had to become a twitter member again, after having deleted my account once, so that I could see what they where twittering about. But it was all good and not controversial at all.
The only thing slightly controversial about the talk or the circumstances of the talk was when the air-condition repair man decided to come in and fix the air-condition during my talk.
One of my PI’s, Dr. Melissa Terras was also present at the conference. To her big surprise the DigiLib blog blogged about her talk while she was speaking. Furthermore, The Spellbound Blog has also covered it.
I am sure she will also blog about the subject of her talk and without sounding like to much of a suck-up I thought it was great. The talk was about the huge resources of online museums and collections out there, often hosted via flickr and created by amateurs (or as Melissa would rather call them: enthusiasts). The range of subjects that these collections cover is huge. There is everything from MUM (Museum of Menstruation and Womens Health) to vintage comic book covers.
The conference was all in all really good and I am looking forward to next year in London.
June 17, 2009 at 6:13 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Knowledge base
I have been working on the XML encoding of the Vindolanda Tablets trying to update the website “Vindolanda Tablets Online” with the new tablets from the third book on The Vindolanda Writting Tablets, whilst adding extended functionality to the website. This includes work with contextual encoding and creating XML through PHP scripting.
This work has enabled me to create a new website for the Vindolanda Tablets, which is not finished yet. It uses the contextual encoding of the Vindolanda Tablets (fig. 1) to pull out the indexed words and allows the user to search through them using AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) LiveSearch technology (fig. 2).
Fig. 1 Contextual Encoding
Fig. 2. Index search of Vindolanda Tablets
The latest on this is the development of a Web Service for the Vindolanda Tablets. The Web Service is built with the RESTful protocol and has the following methods:
get_tablets, which will return basic information about each tablet
get_tablet, will return the original XML for the tablet specified through the parameter ‘tabletID’
get_word, get_calender, get_person, get_military, get_geog, get_all, will either return all the words in each category. The optional parameter ‘pattern’ allows the user to specify a pattern which the words returned must follow. * defines a wildcard character and {bd} allows the user to specify that a character can be either b or d . Using the following url:
http://localhost/vindoWebService/tablet.php?method=get_word&pattern=e*{db}
Will return the word ‘eodem’ (fig. 3) as XML or used in the LiveSearch (fig. 4).
Fig. 3 XML response from Web Service
Fig. 4 LiveSearch use of Web Service
Interpretation Support System
Recently, I have built a prototype for the Interpretation Support System (ISS), which will form the basis of my thesis “Building an Interpretation Support System to aid the reading of Ancient Documents”.
The ISS is build on an idea of a network of minor interpretations (percepts) such as a low level percept : “these three line fragments are an incised stroke” or a higher level percept: “these five letters can make up the word ‘legio’”
The aim is that the expert reading an ancient document should be able to use the ISS for the things which humans find difficult, which are things like:
- Remembering complicated reasoning
- Searching huge datasets
- Accessing other experts knowledge
- Enable cooperation between experts on a single document
The ISS will guide the expert through the steps of identifying and committing to possible:
- Elements (Characters, Interpuncts, Indents and Spaces)
- Characters (a, b or c)
- Words (bovem or quem)
- Phrases, sentences and paragraphs
The process of identifying and committing to these elements, characters and words will be evidence based in the sense that the character ‘h’ (fig. 5) may have several pieces of evidence for or against it. It is however always up to the expert to decide which evidence to listen to.
Fig. 5 Evidence for the interpretation of character ‘h’
Web Services
Finally, the Vindolanda Web Service will be used as a knowledge base of words, which can be evidence for and against certain words or characters (fig. 6).
Fig. 6 ISS use of the Web Service
The plan is that the Vindolanda Web service should not be the only web service used in this way. If an expert was reading a Greek text the Vindolanda Tablets would be pretty useless as a knowledge base. Therefore, we are hoping that it will be possible to use other resources (e.g. Lexicon of Greek Personal Names). A part of the plan is also that each tablet read through the system can be reused as a knowledge base for future tablet readings.
Next entries »
