Another Week! - Jocelyn
I originally thought I could combine the past two weeks into one blog post, but I changed my mind and decided to separate them instead.
I had two important and long meetings early last week. The first was with Marco, who gave me a crash course on the Ruthwell and Bewcastle data. Ruthwell is a bit chaotic at the moment, so we’re working on cleaning and organizing it, as well as adding more README files to make it more user-friendly. Bewcastle, on the other hand, is in much better shape and just needs a few additional README files. We also discussed our Zenodo backups—specifically, what actually needs to be included. Some files don’t need to be archived there in order to have a complete backup of the data.
Unfortunately, we also had to talk about some of the outdated software, particularly the tools used to color the Ruthwell Cross. This is one of the drawbacks of working on such a long-term project, technologies become obsolete.
We’ve also been discussing IIIF technology. While it isn’t fully ready for 3D yet, it’s expected to support it within the next year. ADS mentioned that we might want to consider IIIF for our edition. However, that would mean either delaying the release of the edition or reworking it later, neither of which is ideal.
The second meeting, just ten minutes after the first, was with the Library Research Group, who were presenting Borealis, the new archive the library is adopting. It was an interesting presentation, but I don’t think Borealis is a good fit for our project. It doesn’t offer anything Zenodo doesn’t already provide, and it likely can’t support streaming content since users have to download the data rather than view it online. There’s also the issue of access: collaborators from outside Lethbridge or Canada, or those who leave the university, would lose access. So, while it’s a very cool, Canadian-hosted archive, it’s not the solution we need.
I also updated the Obsidian vault to match Dan’s setup exactly. All the slides have now been added (not without some struggles) and stole all the best Old English tutorials from Dan’s website. This is a short paragraph, but I promise it was actually a lot of work and in that first week I didn’t even have time to organize the files.
That was the first week.
