It’s been a while since I rapped at ya

I’m not dead! I’m just really bad when it comes to blogging. I’m better at Facebook, and somewhat better at Twitter (and Twitter), and I do my best to update Tumblr.

The stated purpose of this blog is to give technical details of my work. This mostly involves finding data, and moving it around from one format to another. I use XSLT, because it’s what I know, although I’ve seen the promise of Python and I may eventually take the time to learn it well. I don’t know when that will happen, though.

I’ve taken to posting files and documentation on Github, so if you’re curious you can look there. If you’re familiar with my interests, and you share them, the most interesting things will be VisColl, a developing system for generating visualizations of manuscript codices showing elements of physical construction, DistributionVis which is, as described on Github, “a wee script to visualize the distribution of illustration in manuscripts from the Walters Art Museum,” and ebooks, files I use to start the process of building ebooks from our digitized collection. (Finished ebooks are archived in UPenn’s institutional repository, you can download them there)

VisColl – quire with an added leaf
DistributionVis – Different color lines refer to different types of illustrations or texts.

VisColl has legs, a lot of interest in the community, and is part of a major grant from the Mellon Foundation to the University of Toronto. Woohoo! DistributionVis is something I threw together in an afternoon because I wanted to see if I could. I thought ebooks were a nice way to provide a different way for people to access our collection. I’ve no idea if either of these two are any use to anyone, but I put them out there, because why not?

I do a lot of putting-things-out-there-because-why-not – it seems to be what I’m best at. So I’m going to continue doing that. And when I do, I shall try my very best to put it here too!

Until next time…