Sandall Update
I’ve now uploaded a new version of Sandall’s history of 5th Lincs with each chapter on a separate page. I thought splitting the pages and getting the internal links to work would be difficult but it turned out to be easier than I thought, although it involves some quite complicated XPath expressions. I’ve also uploaded the new XSLT to show how I did it. This could probably be better in some ways but for now I’m just pleased that it works. While doing this I decided to change the n attribute of the chapter divs from a number to a slug that could be used to make a Google friendly permalink.
Now I’m waiting for Google to re-index the site so that the custom search actually works. Meanwhile I’ve started tagging people, places, dates and abbreviations. More on that when I’ve finished. I’m also increasingly confident that the photos are in the public domain (see these guidelines, which make things a bit clearer, if they’re right), so they’ll probably be added soon.
Comment by Gary Smailes — 9:03 am, 10 January 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
This is great work. Do you know if this kind of thing has been done before for others histories?
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 10:38 am, 10 January 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
I’ve seen at least one WWI unit history on Project Gutenberg, but their text encoding isn’t as rich as what I’m doing with TEI. It seems to me that they put more effort than is necessary into creating digital texts which aren’t as good as they could be.
John Bourne at the Centre for First World War Studies at Birmingham is working on digital editions of out of print books but I don’t think they’re finished yet.