Digital Things
Another not quite proper post - just a round-up of some things I’ve been doing.
The most important thing is that I’ve more or less finished the switch to Zotero. I managed to fix the bug in the MODS translator, which allowed me to import the 1,000+ records (along with associated notes) from my old database without any trouble. That success encouraged me to have a go at writing an Adlib XML translator so I could scrape records from the RHS Bibliography. It’s actually not as difficult as I thought before. I managed to get a working demo but then I gave up because the XML that the RHS site outputs isn’t very good. First, Adlib XML isn’t as detailed as MODS XML, and second, the RHS people don’t seem to have applied the tags very consistently. That means that any records scraped into Zotero would still need quite a bit of manual adjustment. Today I tried getting some new records from the RHS without a scraper, using the links to COPAC and getCopy which appear on most records. Although this was slower than scraping the records directly off the page it worked reasonably well. Books are no problem because they can nearly always be found on COPAC with one click. Journal articles are more hit and miss. Sometimes getCopy leads to a page that Zotero can scrape, sometimes it doesn’t. Essays in collections are the worst as they have to be entered manually. Today’s test was just a simple keyword search for “animals” which only returned 250 results. Over the rest of the week I need to find everything I can about the causes and outbreak of the English Civil War. I already have several hundred ECW related works on file from my PhD, but there will still be a lot of stuff which wasn’t relevant to that which I need to track down now.
Meanwhile over at Early Modern Notes, Sharon noted the death of bookmarks. I still use bookmarks a lot more than some people, but it is true that I’m using them less than I used to. RSS has played a big part in this decline. I use WizzRSS to subscribe to the blogs that I read regularly. Zotero is also taking over from bookmarks as it’s a much more powerful way of keeping track of webpages - you can keep a snapshot of the page (or several snapshots taken at different times), tag it, add it to collections, attach notes, relate it to other items.
I also got excited about the release of CommentPress, a Wordpress theme which allows paragraph level comments. One thing I’d like to use this for is putting my PhD thesis online. I could just let people download a PDF, but apart from giving readers the chance to comment on it, I’d like to comment on it myself first! It might also be useful as a feedback mechanism for the digital edition of Sandall’s history of 5th Lincs that I’m working on. I really want some way for readers to be able to suggest corrections, and something like CommentPress would be easier than programming something myself. So I downloaded it to try it out on my local server setup, but I couldn’t get it to work! It might be something to do with Windows, so tomorrow I’ll try to run it on my web host, which is on Linux.
I’ve had more success with Python. Getting to grips with it has been on my to do list for a long time, but I finally got round to downloading and installing the Python interpreter. I haven’t done much with it yet, but it looks like a good language. I used to be prejudiced against it because it doesn’t have curly braces (which are the mark of a “proper” programming language!) but its syntax is actually more concise than that, and nothing like the horrors of Visual Basic. I should be having lots of Python based fun over the coming weeks.
