A couple very practical questions
While reading the posts on the encoding of Villani, several not-too-pleasant memories came to mind from months of encoding the Decameron. I too was desperately looking forward to using the encoding, like Matt, for pedagogical purposes, but once Dynaweb went awol all that work went down the drain, leaving us with no ability to run cross-searches on the text. (I still lose sleep thinking about it.) So, this leads me to pose a couple questions, which - I hope - lead in productive directions. Forgive me if I’m missing something simple.
1. Is there a plan within the framework of the VHL to recuperate this functionality in the Decameron’s part of the project? If so, could it be done before the course starts up in January? Indeed, is there any way to tweak it so that it will come back to life within what Paul is doing?
2. How reliant are we now with the new projects upon an external structure like this? I would hate to go through all of this only to have it die a Dynaweb death.
Hopefully,
M
Mike, this is a great point you raise: the Decameron text is now on VHL, isn’t it? I tried to address the very same issue toward the end of my previous posting (General Assessment). Of course, I share your feelings about the work done for DW and never come to fruition. I do not think that on the VHL platform we run the same risk we did with Dynaweb (Paul and Vika can correct me if I’m wrong). In fact, I’d like to think that some of the search capabilities that were lost when Dynaweb “expired” could be restored: what would it take? Is the problem at the level of encoding or what? Can it be fixed? I am willing to invest some of my personal research money for cleaning up the Decameron XML, if we can find somebody that can do it, over the next few weeks; but first, we do need a clear assessment of the situation.
Massimo, I don’t believe there was ever a technical problem with restoring the search functions of the Decameron text. From what I understood at the time (and it may have been a wrong impression!), there was reluctance to bring the semantic searching back because nobody could be Absolutely Sure of the accuracy and completeness of the encoding.
With VHL, though, we’re explicitly workshopping texts: the encoding does not (nor may it) claim to be complete. So perhaps marrying Decameron into that happy family will render its image more flexible, and given resources, the semantic search engine can probably be brought back.
Mike: yes, we’ll definitely avoid a Dynaweb death. As far as I know, the only languages/technologies (besides the obvious HTML) being used by VHL are XML, PHP (an open-source language) and SQL (the database). None of these look like they’ll be going away anytime soon.
Can I add my voice to the pleas for a restored search service? I’m teaching the Decameron this semester and next, and we’ve been struggling with the current text search engine. My preferred feature was always the simple word search, which produced the list of distributions and locations throughout the text (including number of occurrences). The Cardiff and Bristol University boccaccisti (junior chapter) would be eternally grateful!
Please don’t forget that the online concordance addresses this problem… and does even more!
Thanks for the reminder, Mike - I will set the finalists loose on it this week!