jensopetersen / nic

An eXist app providing access to and manipulation of a curated and edited collection of primary resources for teaching and studying the 18th-century novel in English. A later goal is to create a portable platform for the collaborative generation of reliable coursepack materials.

NiC

An eXist app that makes accessible a curated and edited collection of primary resources for teaching the eighteenth-century novel in English

Things I Want to Do (In No Particular Order)

• Add live link functionality to tei:imprint/extent[@type='online']
• Added iteration for multiple XML contributors
• Correct live linking to title in search results
• Correct live linking to query term in search results
• Typeswitch case in tei2html.xql doesn't return tags
• Add facsimile page images (sample images available in /images)
• Refine page image display - page images embedded in hays.xml -- see notes on page images below
• Correct the branching path for selecting either view-play.html or view-work.html to default to one -- see note below
• Add new kinds of xml files, linked to sample xml files currently in /data--for instance, headnotes and reading/study questions
• Why isn't the About link working as expected? I.e., like the Search Help link?
• Add user functionality for uploading and/or sub-collection creation
• Define a workflow to curate user contributions
• Enable users to select records from among all the data sources for inclusion into a pdf or a subcollection
• Generate a TOC and pagination for the resulting pdf
• Refine xml structure and create a style guide for user contributions
• Add topic model and graphing functionality
• Searching: what happens with hits in the epigraph?
• How best to mark up topics in the xml? How can they be searched, or displayed?

Thoughts on App Structure

In the Shakespeare app, view-play.html or view-work.html are different, depending on the needs of the data. My app currently has no need of a distinction here, so I want to make view-work.html the default. This seems to be configured both in controller.xql and in app:work-title, but I think I may need help here.

Thoughts on Page Images

1. How to display the page images?
   • I want to keep the elements inline with the xml. However, it may be more elegant to display them in a side bar or a footer, so as not to interrupt the flow of reading (see note 2).
   • The page images should be thumbnailed, and onclick show a high-res or at least full-size image.
   • How to automate this? Count the elements, add on -00.png, -01.png, -02.png and so forth, depending on the count? Automation here is probably also determined by where the images are located. I don't want them to be stored in the regular data folder--or do I? How do I associate the xml with the page images? In the doc-types file, or in naming conventions? Would like some help with this.
2. What if the application evolves to take not only textual excerpts with facsimile images, but also images themselves, like paintings or photographs of material objects?
   • Issues of focus and purpose emerge. Currently, the textual transcription and markup is the primary focus, with the page images functioning as secondary visual resources.

Thoughts on Searching

1. Need to ensure everything that should be searched is searched.
   • Epigraph hits should be returned--are they? With recent changes, teiHeader hits are no longer returned, which is good.
   • Definitely want to enable search for topics, or strings within xml marked by topic (searching, definitely; search within may be less useful)--but perhaps this is best reserved for the topic-model module?
   • A precursor step would be to display a topic list in each xml file.