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 […]
After last week’s server move, we discovered one or two things that needed to be changed before they could go live. The main thing was the Xapian search which I had been working on. The initial version kept the Xapian server on the local machine and used that to index and search the letters butt […]
As a break from Open Correspondence, I’ve been looking at node.js, the server side Javascript library. I’ve been thinking about the document stuff that I’ve been working on with Milton. One of the things that I had mooted as an idea was reading Twitter and pushing them back to the document. I’ve been playing with […]
I’ve been talking with Rufus Pollock about moving the Open Correspondence web site as we’ve had the occasional snafu with bringing the site back up after maintenance. I’m pleased to say that we managed the move last night and the site is back up, DNS moved and so on. The one thing that really surprised […]
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 […]
A quiet week as I’ve been having a few days off but I’ve been working on some of the tickets for Open Correspondence. The urls have changed to /letters/view/<author>/<correspondent>/<letter id> in an attempt to make them more user friendly and also to allow the user to define smaller or larger collections by altering the url. […]
