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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Rob Myers reposted this New York Times link on the Open Knowledge Foundation discussion list about Digital Humanities and its growth. It mentions the Mapping the Republic of Letters project (unfortunately it does not appear to be open) and its linking together of the centres of letter production. Last night I managed to build the […]
I’ve been going over some ideas that have been bubbling in my mind for a while about using RDF to load in further details about a test in question. I’ve gone back to an old Milton file, the Areopagitica, that I created for another project but never really used. Essentially its part of the Burke […]
As an aid to getting over the first (and hopefully last) seasonal cold, I’ve been implementing Xapian as a search engine, using the Python bindings. I did look at Solr as an alternative but the set up costs outweighed the fact that Xapian is already installed on the server as part of Python. Unlike OpenMilton, […]
Over the weekend, I read an interesting article, “Edmund Burke: How did a long-dead Irishman become the hottest thinker of 2010?“, by Amol Rajan in the Independent on the philosopher, Edmund Burke. In the past I’ve read his musings on the sublime in “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime […]
Devin Coldewey has an intriguing post over on Crunchgear regarding the Google Books project. Google have digitised some books. Just one or two. Like many other people, I find the project useful for finding information and books I’d never come across or lost somewhere. Sometimes I’ll buy the book, sometimes I just need a bit […]
Given the increasingly digital nature of research, including not only websites but blogs, forums, wikis, the (in my view), beloved moleskin is becoming increasingly outdated. I’ve just finished writing my first book and had the joy of using moleskin notebooks to note down urls and make notes. I like moleskins a lot but pen and […]
