As part of the next version of Open Correspondence, I’ve been working on the XML and JSON mark-up. As part of the XML, I’ve been using the TEI mark-up for the letters. I once hard this described as “XML for people who don’t think XML is flexible enough”. Now I can see why. It is …
Finding and mapping influences
The awesome Jonathan Gray posted an intriguing question on his blog about mapping influence in intellectual history. What he is trying to do is to map the possible routes of influence between people. In his case, it is philosophers; in mine, authors. One of the driving ideas behind the Open Correspondence RDF was to begin …
Adding linguistic interfaces to Open Correspondence
I’ve been playing around with the Python NLTK package, in particular the WordNet interface. WordNet is hosted by Princeton University. I mentioned that I was going to look at this and the idea of allow a search for lemmas of a word. It came about from a question posed on Open Literature mailing list regarding …
Weeknotes: Open Correspondence updates
I’ve bitten the bullet and done it. I’ve uploaded the current changes to the Open Correspondence site. The current changes are: additional fields in the RDF endpoint. I still need to do some major work to JSON and XML which I hope to do for the next update. a basic text search a basic set …
Weeknotes: Conferences and Open Correspondence
On Wednesday I went to the JISC dev8d conference. I wish I could have gone for both days but time doesn’t permit at the moment. In all, I had a trhough provoking day and managed to catch talks on the Mobile Web (which I wasn’t expecting) and Linked Data. Whilst I didn’t attend the programming …
Weeknotes: Places in Open Correspondence
I’ve been doing some work to Open Correspondence over the last couple of weeks. I started re-parsing the letters to expose some more metadata, mainly placenames and to normalise them. I’ve finally done the first pass of this update which I’m hoping to make live soon once I’ve updated the controllers and re-checked the other …
Exposing the Classic Serial data
I’ve just been listening to the serialisation of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone on Radio Four in its Classic serial slot. Whilst listening (and remembering how much I had enjoyed it when I read it years ago), I began thinking about trying to expose it as Linked Data so that the book’s publication detail could be …
Research Databases in the Humanities
I went to the Research Databases in the Humanities workshop, organised by Sudamih, which was an excellent afternoon and time well spent. An Oxford heavy event, there were a number of interesting directions that came out of the afternoon. Firstly James Wilson, project manager of Sudamih at Oxford University Computing Services, outlined the Database as …
Weeknotes: Arts funding, Open Correspondence
I’ve been doing some updating this week rather than anything new. I was going to spend time trying to complete the places section of the Open Correspondence website. It needs some tidying up as the endpoint has had some changes made to it. I did come across an issue which has implications in exposing other …
Searching Open Correspondence with Xapian
As part of the continuing work on Open Correspondence, I managed to install Xapian to act as a full text search engine. I’ve been looking to do this for a while and had started on working on a remote back end (as blogged here) but decided not to use it as it appears to have …