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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Marshall Kirkpatrick, on ReadWriteWeb, poses the question A web of infinite information: does that sound like a scary problem of “just too much”? in a “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Data Wranglers” where he discusses an interview with Evan Williams on GigaOm. (I’m not going to discuss the interview here (but […]
I lost my hackday cherry yesterday and went to the Open Data hackathon to look at the South East arts council data found at the data.gov.uk site (http://data.gov.uk/dataset/grants-for-the-arts-awards-arts-council-england). Our hosts, White October, were fantastic and welcoming (and put the kettle on as soon as I came in!) and Incuna provided the much needed pizzas for […]
A brief post but I saw this article in the print version of the Observer on All Visual Arts (AVA) this morning on a the (re)rise of private arts funding. It set me thinking. Given the supposed interest in buying arts from those who are not billionaires, could micro-funding model be applied to the arts […]
As part of the Open Correspondence project, I’ve started to look at place names and locations to build a set of temporal and spatial data for the letters to allow for geographical queries. As part of the search, I came across a reference to Sean Gillies’ useful blog post talking about modelling historical place names […]
Progress on the next version of Open Correspondence has been a bit slower than I would have like. Sleep is, however, useful to being alert enough to write code. I’ve gone back to the some of the work that I was doing for the first version of the site way back last year. As part […]
