Okay, so it’s well into the new semester. But, although things have been slow here on the weblog, they’ve been moving at a pretty exciting speed here at VHL HQ.

In a nutshell:

• Paul has created the annotation engine! It was tested with a dummy text, and next we’ll be testing it with real ones.
• Part of the Esposizioni, just over 2000 of its 5000 paragraphs, is now ready to be put up, tested and cleaned up. Segments of Villani to follow imminently.
• It looks like several of us are presenting VHL in many different venues; as such, at a meeting held last weekend we decided it would be great to have some business cards. I’m looking into that.
• This semester will be dedicated to testing the annotation engine, beginning to actually annotate the texts we’re putting up, and hopefully gaining some momentum in terms of public interest by contacting people who might want to annotate specifically the texts we’re putting up. Italianists, medievalists – anyone reading this want to play? Please let us know in comments if you do.
• We’re leaving the search engine and generating indices mostly for the second year of the grant. That’ll be a big project.

Aside from writing the papers I’ll be presenting in March, June and July, as well as checking in on the progress of various project components, I’ll be concentrating on getting the texts to play nicely with the code. Having just spent several hours cleaning up the Esposizioni chunk a bit (nothing major, just structural well-formedness), I’m excited to get my hands on actual code again. It’s so… logical. XML is a great toy, and tool.

Guyda and I have been asked for a few screenshots of the annotation engine, for the Digital Medievalist article; I’ll post them here when I make them.

My colleagues can update the world about their own work in more detail. Undoubtedly I’m missing something(s). Feel free to supplement this short report, o Team.