Author: admin

• Better sorting of strings ending in numbers when browsing books.
• Formatting fix of French help translation
• Minor French translation updates
• Made 32 manuscripts from the Bibliothèque nationale avilable

We are working now to flesh out the manuscript descriptions of the newly uploaded manuscripts and tag the illustrations.

Below is a list of the changes. Later posts will give more detailed explanations of the new features.

Help document:

• Content updates
• Layout fixes

Collection spreadsheet: New feature!

• Mined manuscript descriptions to create spreadsheet
• Tabular view with Google visualizations
• Downloadable in CSV format for use with local spreadsheet applications

Illustration titles: New feature!

• Tabular view of titles, average position, and frequency.
• Data generated from image tagging

Extant manuscripts:

• Moved to tabular Google visualization
• Link to view in Google docs

Narrative sections: New feature!

• Poem divided into sections. Each section has an id, a description, and a Lecoy range.
• Tabular view of ids, titles, and Lecoy range
• Click on section id to search for folios containing that section

Narrative mapping: New feature!

• A manuscript is mapped by finding the start and end of each section in that manuscript.
• The mapping may be done manually, which takes a long time, or automatically.
• The automatic mapping takes as input a description of the book structure and guesses the column of the section start/end.
• Only a few manuscripts are mapped so far.
• The sections can be searched by title and id.
• Section in the current page can be displayed to the right of the page turner.
• Manual mapping includes a transcription of the first line of each section.

Character names: New feature!

• List of characters in the poem

Miscellaneous:

• Lecoy number always displayed with leading L
• Display date when site last updated
• Navigation on left reworked
• Rubrics that are transcribed when describing the book structure for automatic narrative mapping are searchable
• Normalization of illustration titles in image tagging
• Hit enter in text box to do advanced search
• Additional and updated French translations
• Guessing names of printed book folios works better.
• Finer grained tracking of site usage with Google analytics.
• Mention contactus email when internal error occurs
• Summary book descriptions added
• More manuscripts cropped for page turner
• Google visualization api used for tabular views of site. Click on column title to sort (unless sort is disabled for that table)

Known issues:

• Webkit (Safari, Chrome) layout problem with header being offset.
• Tabular Google visualization sometimes has columns misaligned. Click on column title to fix.

• Display table with basic information above codicological description.
• New “Extant manuscripts” page uses an embedded google spreadsheet to display a corpus of Rose manuscripts being produced by Prof. Timothy Stinson.
• BnF fr. 12595 has a codicological description.

Popping up the flash image viewing application was not working with Internet Explorer. The bug has been fixed.

The problem involved different ways in which browsers treat arguments to the Javascript method window.open().

We recently found a bug with the page turner. If a user selects a folio by using the text box and then goes to the next page using the slider button or corner/edge dragging, the book will flip forward one page and then immediately back one page.

The source of the problem appears to be the flash application, but its not entirely clear. For the time being we have removed the slider and disabled corner/edge dragging. Pages can still be turned by clicking on the larger buttons pointing right and left.

Alternatively we could keep the slider and dragging behaviour by having the text box reload the entire page turner when a folio is entered. Let us know if you would prefer this option.

Below is a list of the technical issues we know about. Some of them may be fixed as time goes on. More bug reports are welcome!

Missing search result thumbnails

When search results are displayed, the Erez image server is asked to generate a thumbnail for each result. But for various reasons some images are missing. The browser displays a broken link for the missing image. Because information about the images making up a book is only loaded when the book is selected, the website cannot know which search results correspond to missing images.

This will be fixed when we add a “missing image” image.

Fragile bookmarks

FSI notepad bookmarks are stored in cookies in the client browser and depend on the order of images in a book being fixed. But addressing foliation errors requires that we change the order. The change will make bookmarks inaccurate. This is a limitation of FSI.

Page turner / Image browser bookmark separation

FSI notepad bookmarks for the page turner and image browser are separated. Bookmarks made in one cannot show up in another. This is a limitation of FSI.

Webkit layout bug

Webkit, used by Safari and Google Chrome among others, has a problem with our CSS. It causes the header to be slightly offset. I’ve been unable to figure out what is going on. Help is welcome!

Minor page turner inconsistency

As pages are flipped in the page turner, two image names are shown. When one image is picked, only the name of that image is shown. If the user then goes back to the two page display, only the last selected image name is displayed until the page is flipped. This is caused by odd choices in the design of FSI callbacks.