We have reached a point in our biennial NEH grant period when we can make a general assessment of our progress and look carefully at upcoming challenges. I would like to publicly praise our project director for her tireless efforts in keeping all of us committed and getting things done. Thanks to Vika and Paul, great progress has been made in the overall design infrastructure of VHL. One of the major challenges we have encountered so far is the relative gap in the advancement of the various projects that compose VHL (Esposizioni, Conclusiones and Cronica). The encoding of Esposizioni is proceeding at good pace (thanks in particular to the excellent work done by Roberto, this semester, but also thanks to feedback from all members of the team, Mike in particular, and Guyda). The Pico Project is now ready to enter a new, exciting phase, that of active, collaborative annotation, involving some 25-30 scholars over three continents (our thanks to Francesco Borghesi for all his painstaking work of coordination, over the past few months). Pico and Esposizioni are more advanced than the Villani project, and a genuine effort will have to be made now for the latter to meet the goals we assigned ourselves for the second year of our grant. While the different stages of development of the various projects do not represent a problem per se, it is of the utmost importance that we try to bring them all to a level in which the common framework and interface provided by the VHL can be effectively exploited. This is particularly true for the Boccaccio–Dante-Villani component, as the possibility of cross-referencing these texts is greater and also depends on our encoding choices. First of all, it is crucial that the XML encoding schemes for both Esposizioni and Villani continue to be publicly discussed and tested, hoping for a feedback from the scholarly community at large. Documenting our encoding practice, as we go, is therefore essential. The blog is an excellent tool for this purpose. The more we blog about our work-in-progress, including our doubts, problems and difficult choices, the more feedback we can expect from our team members as well as scholars elsewhere. Moreover, we can now begin to at least think forward to further developments of VHL. As you remember, its two fundamental components are what we call the Editing House and the Seminar Room. Both together make up our Laboratory (or Workshop). Both share the same platform and a suite of tools to be developed as we go. Let’s think of these two components as both virtual meeting and working spaces and a set of scholarly and pedagogical practices. While the Editing House is taking shape, we should also begin to envision what the Seminar Room may be like. Searchable and interactively annotated editions of our texts provide also a platform for a number of learning activities. When we look at encoding, we should always keep this (its potential application in the “virtual classroom”) in mind. On the annotation side, the Pico Project may serve as a prototype. The experiment in collaborative annotation about to begin can also be a test for interfacing research and pedagogical activities: annotating can be conceived as an ongoing seminar in which participants learn from each other (the complexity of Pico’s text imposes more than allows this). I expect our weblog to be also a venue where methodological discussion about the annotation process and its procedures takes place. Next semester, the Decameron Web will also be “reactivated” for the course I’ll be teaching again for the first time in four years: I hope this will offer us another opportunity for a general updating of its content as well as for thinking about its potential improvement within the framework of VHL.

Okay, so we’ve got some problems. That’s why I wanted feedback — thanks to all who responded.

The problem is this: Internet Explorer is notoriously bad at interpreting CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, the language that tells your browser how and where to display things). CSS is a standard that has been around for years; all other browsers conform to it, but IE doesn’t. Why? Because it’s Microsoft, no other reason. I am biased, it’s true; but it’s also true that Microsoft designers should get it together and un-break their software.

Rebecca’s comment about Firefox 1.0 does give me pause. I think I know how to fix it, though, and will do so momentarily.

Because there are now many browsers available for download at no charge, all of which interpret CSS correctly, I don’t think it’s practical to spend too much time fixing the IE bugs. I will look into it, to be sure; but it’s likely to require more time than we have. I spoke to Paul about this yesterday, too, and he agreed: for now, we should work with standards-compliant software and make things work there; then, if we still have the time and money, we can go back and fix the IE bugs. Meanwhile, if you have a chance, please look at the prototype again with Mozilla/Safari/Firefox/your non-IE poison, and let me know if there are any more problems.

Dear all,

It’s just a shell so far, and its aesthetics are not set in stone: right now we’re mostly working on functionality. But I’d like to get your feedback, from a user’s perspective.

The prototype is here. I’m pointing you to the login page, but the login engine doesn’t work yet, so you don’t have to worry about having a username and password. Just play around with the menus up top, and let me know what you think.

All the texts links lead to one dummy table of contents, and all the index links – to a single dummy index. The links from the entries in the index will eventually lead to a page with a list of the places where the name appears.

The main question I have is: is this intuitive? Does the design itself make sense? If you the user have a question about the functionality of the tools on the site, is it obvious where to go to get an answer?

UPDATE. The first bug report has come in: the site doesn’t seem to be working on browsers running under Mac OS 9. So please look at the prototype using either Mac OS X, or a Windows machine. As always, please let me know if it doesn’t work for you. If you’re submitting a bug report, please include the browser you’re using, the version of that browser, and your operating system.

It’s been an eventful month here at VHL HQ. Guyda and I have just submitted a paper proposal to a publication, and separately from that I’ve submitted a couple of others, for conferences. We’ve set up people with encoding, which for now seems to be going well. Have met with Rala and Matt regarding Villani – I’ll let them expound on that. Esposizioni work seems to be going well too: I have repeatedly met with Roberto, who is kicking pretty seriously on the encoding; and Cristiana, Guyda and Mike have been researching aspects of the text.

Paul and I have started talking about the overall structure of the interface. For now, we’re focusing on the seminar room features, which will be the most widely used; he is thinking about back-end architecture and I am playing with layouts. For now, there’s a lot of preliminary dirty work on this front; as soon as there’s something concrete to share, we’ll post.