I'm Going on Vacation!!!!! -Jocelyn
The last blog of July. Yippee.
With three weeks left of the summer, there is a lot of work to be done, and this week there was no slacking. Not an ounce of slacking to be seen.
The Visionary Cross viewer has received another facelift. The navigation was reworked again and it’s very nice. We stepped away from the navigation look of Caedmon’s Hymn edition and made a new layout that works better for the project. It is no longer built on the idea of a circle but instead exactly how anyone thinking of navigation would imagine it’s built. I also tried to make the headers smaller as per the boss’s request, but I think there is something in the CSS controlling the size because it looks the exact same as before, but now with reduced quality.
Draft emails were created for PURE3D and the Smithsonian, but they have to be reworked a little bit. Additionally, it was decided that I should go find out everything I can about how they work before the emails are sent. After all, nothing would be more embarrassing than us asking a question which could be answered if we had just read the website. Based on the reading I have done on the Smithsonian’s 3D group, I have really high hopes. It’s open source and API-based. This is exactly what we need. Hopefully we get an update on all of that in two weeks.
My poster is ready for the symposium. It is beautiful and aesthetic, and I removed the spelling errors. It focuses on what the goals were for the summer and then four key areas that I was working on: restoration (so basically, figuring out what we had and if I could save anything from different eras of this ancient project), scaffolding (making preliminary versions of the edition and getting blueprints for where we are going), surveying the field (looking at what everyone else has done and innovating off of them and figuring out what we would need for a 3D edition), and finally hosting 3D (which, as we know, is the bane of my existence as I struggle to find anywhere that will let us stream our models). I made some very nice diagrams for the concepts and included recognition to SSHRC as they funded us and we are required to recognize them during every presentation. It turned out well and now I just have to send it in to get printed (even though really the university should be paying for it, considering they are requiring me to give a physical poster, and it costs $50).
The course book is going well, and we moved around some stuff and expanded other sections. Dan explained that my revised order of the modern English grammar lessons would not do, and so they have been put back and the syllabus has been fixed. We used ChatGPT to make up 15 extra sentences for Mitchell and Robinson’s Practice Sentences C because we want every student to have one sentence. Of course, not all sentences are made equal, but that’s life and 5 students might suffer. GPT did an excellent job. We were able to prompt it into extracting exactly what grammar features Robinson was trying to teach with his sentences, and then we got GPT to make its own sentences with the same features in mind. We went through them and made sure nothing was too complicated (switched out one of the verbs) and plopped it into the Obsidian with the other sentences. I haven’t checked the glossary in the back of the book to see if all the words are there, but I can’t imagine sentences so basic wouldn’t be applicable to that glossary.
As for the Peterborough Chronicle, I have been doing stuff. We decided that the Pre-Roman Preface was too short, considering it was only 7 sentences or something like that. So, we’ve been looking for more passages. We decided the ones in Evan’s Old English textbook were acceptable, but the only problem is that I left the book in the lab, and I don’t have an online copy, and it’s not available from my sketchy websites. I haven’t quite decided what to do yet, because I found an edition of the Chronicle from a couple of years ago which is very nice, but the great thing with the Evan’s book is that there were specialized glossaries for the passages. So, the plan was to use that class to teach glossary. However, if we just pick 3 more paragraphs of around the same size (7 sentences), then we could do fun things. For example, there could be 4 groups and that day could be done in small groups instead of as a whole class, with the TAs and professor circling and supervising. That could be fun for the first taste of real Old English. Nevertheless, no matter if we use Evan’s or some passages I like, an introduction will have to be written so it matches Mitchell and Robinson’s style. About 1 page will do it and I call dibs on that task.
One more issue is that none of the editions have diacritics in the same way Mitchell and Robinson do. There’s the occasional macron on top of an i or a u, but Mitchell and Robinson are diacritic enthusiasts. Do I try to add the diacritics to the texts (Evan or edition—both would need them)? Or will it even make a difference? I don’t know if the students are paying that close attention to them, and for me, I don’t even remember using them that much. Maybe it’ll make pronunciation harder, but really, I’m not qualified to make editorial decisions of that scale on anything.
As we move towards the end of summer, it’s time to start filling in the content, like the nouns and verb sections. After all, everything that I could take for the course book was taken, and there is just new stuff left.
Happy thoughts. You’ll hear from me in 2 weeks, as I take my well deserved vacation.
