Posted 3 years ago by sfalkowski

To get more practice at using HTML, I chose to put Carl Sandburg’s poem “Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard” into this language.

I set the entire poem up as a block quote, by using block quote tags before and after the text, inclusive of title and citation. For the title, I decided on a heading level 2, judging that since I set this up as a block quote, there would be at least one higher level of heading on this hypothetical webpage.

Image showing the HTML for a block quote and header level 2. — Figure 1 Showing the HTML for a block quote and header level 2.

The first line of the poem begins with an indent, and so to include this indent, I used the <pre> element to tell the computer that this indent is not for the purposes of keeping my place in the lines of code, but that it is part of the text and belongs in the displayed version. This is shown in step 3 of Figure 2.

Indent of first line using <pre srcset= — Figure 2 Indent of first line using <pre> tag.

After entering in each line, I added the break <br> element so that the next line would appear on the next line. Without these line breaks, the lines run together as though they were a prose paragraph and not verse.

Figure 3 Using line break tags to separate lines of poetry.

After the final line break, I used the <cite></cite> citation tags to properly attribute this poem to Carl Sandburg. This is shown in step 10 of Figure 4.

The final HTML form of Carl Sandburg's "Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard," including the citation. — Figure 4 The final HTML form of Carl Sandburg’s “Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard,” including the citation.

HTML Recipe Experiment

Posted 3 years ago by sfalkowski

original form of barbecue spareribs recipie — Recipe for Barbecue Spareribs as printed in the 1961 Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cook Book. Note the lack of formatting.

For my first attempt at coding, I chose a favorite barbecue spareribs recipe from Betty Crocker’s 1961 New Picture Cook Book.

First, because this recipe was not originally written in list format, either for ingredients or instructions, I had to type out the recipe introducing these style conventions. Then using codepen.io, I put it into HTML. I began with the heading, putting the title of the recipe between header one tags, as shown in the first steps below in Figure 2.

From there, I added the first ordered list, using the <ol> </ol> tags before and after, and sandwiching each step of the instructions between list item <li></li> tags. This produced a numbered list on the right hand pane.

Image showing the HTML entries behind the main header and first ordered list. — Figure 1 Showing the HTML entries behind the main header and first ordered list.

The next part of the recipe is another recipe unto itself, so I added a lower level of heading, heading 2, to the words “Texas Barbecue Sauce,” just as I had done for the main heading, only now using <h2></h2> in place of <h1></h1>. A screenshot of the step is below in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Step 11 shows the new subheading after the ordered list.

After this is the unordered ingredients list, which got wrapped in <ul></ul> unordered list tags. For each ingredient, however, the same tags were used as in the ordered list to denote a list item. Because I used unordered list tags on this list, each ingredient was rendered with a bullet point in the right hand pane, as seen in Figure 3.

Image showing the input for unordered lists in HTML — Figure 3 Showing the input for unordered lists in HTML

For the instruction section of this sub-recipe, I returned to using the ordered list <ol> </ol> tags. And thusly, my recipe for barbecue spareribs is now in HTML format.

Figure 4 The complete recipe for Barbecue Spareribs with Texas Barbecue Sauce in HTML.

Comparing Timeline Creators

Posted 3 years ago by sfalkowski

Good timeline programs can be invaluable to visualizing the flow of historical events and make connections that may otherwise remain invisible. While pen and paper remain my favorite means for timeline creation, there are a lot of advantages to digitally created timelines. In this post I will be discussing two such programs: Aeon Timeline and Preceden. While both have functionality suited to project management, and more, I will be focusing on how I more commonly interact with these programs, i.e. the creation of visual displays of historical chronologies.

Aeon Timeline

Aeon Timeline is a downloadable application for Mac, Windows, and iOS. A nice feature is that this program is not paid for on a subscription basis, but allows lifetime access to that version of Aeon. I have been using Aeon Timeline since its first version around ten years ago. Below is a gallery of a handful of timelines I created with Aeon dating back to 2012.

Timeline of Religion in Colonial North America made with Aeon — Timeline of Byzantine history made with Aeon Timeline

Currently, in 2022, Aeon is in its third version, and as such has become more functional for a variety of timeline types. One of its newer features is the ability to view and import data in spreadsheet form.

In Aeon, different types of information can be added, events, and those can be grouped into different arcs, and entities, which may include people or organizations, and with the handy “Relationship View” it is easy to see where the entities and events intersect. Below is an example showing English Renaissance playwright “entities” and the “events” of their play publications in relationship view, which even displays the age of the playwright at the publication of each play with which they are associated.

With so many functions to toggle, customize, and organize, Aeon can take some practice to know how to use effectively, but overall is a useful aid in organizing chronological data.

Preceden (formerly TimeRime)

Preceden is a web-based program, and as such does not require the download of an application. Account set-up is simple, as is entering data into your timeline. The user interface is more streamlined and intuitive than Aeon, while still having a good deal of complex functionality. There is a free option that limits you to 10 entries per timeline – for unlimited access there are subscription options.

Events can be assigned to different “Layers” if, as in my example, you wanted to view the lifetimes of important people separately from notable writings, in the same way Aeon uses “Arcs.”

Events can have designated dates or dates relative to other events, as shown left, and can even be marked as approximate, which tells the program to blur the endpoints to make this distinction visible (at least as long as the event’s duration bar is long enough for the blurring to be discernible- note the difference in the above sample between the clear blurring of end-dates for Pseudo-Chrysostom and the less obvious blurring for the Life and Miracles).

It isn’t straightforward how to enter dates prior to 100 BCE. In this example, I had trouble getting the dates for Thecla entered due to the program’s assumption that the year 30 meant 1930 and was therefore after the approximated death date of 120. While entering it as 030 or 0030 did not work, adding AD after did the trick. (Another difficulty is the dates are given using the BC/AD time scale, seemingly without the option of switching to BCE/CE, or of using different calendar dating systems, among their date formatting options – there may be a work-around, but I’ve yet to find it.)

The strength of Preceden is in its ease of use and variety of templates and themes to easily customize the appearance of your timeline or have your pick of professional templates.

Using OpenRefine

A certain data set on the British Library’s comic book holdings has a number of issues that makes using this data to answer specific questions rather difficult. In this post, I will use OpenRefine to clean and sort the data such that it can answer a specific question, in this case, “How many of the British Library’s comic books have a questioned place of publication listed?”

As above noted, this data has numerous issues, including:

Authors: some authors names are given last, first; some have a period after the name; some a comma after the name; sometimes the same name is entered in different formats
Place of Publications: some give only city names, others city and state, others just a country; state names are abbreviated in various ways; some publication places are bracketed; some have multiple entries.
Publisher: the same publisher is not always entered the same way, e.g. Titan, Titan Books, Titan [distributor], et.al. all refer to the same publisher
Date of Publication: some dates end with a period, some do not, some are bracketed, some are circa dates
Some entries do not have information for all the fields

The basic problem is in the inconsistent ways information is entered in the spreadsheet.
Not all of these problems need to be resolved to answer the question regarding comics whose place of publication is uncertain, but some of the inconsistencies are best eliminated.

Many of the place of publication entries are bracketed, and if we want to look deeper into the question, we probably want “London?” and “[London?]” counted together.
To do this, I used the the transform tool and told it to remove the brackets in this column. The previews show “[London?]” being transformed to just “London?”

Our question can be answered by using the filter text tool in the column for Place of Publication and entering a question mark in the search field, since glancing through the data, this seems to be the way uncertainty is denoted. The text filter limits the view to only those comics that have a question mark in their place of publication. However, looking further into the matter using the facet tool, we see that there are 28 ways in which a question mark appears. Many of them denote the uncertainty in question, others seem to question the spelling of the place’s name.

At this point, it is simple enough to specify which of the twenty-eight are relevant and select them to be included. This gives us 233 records for comics whose place of publication is guessed at. And we can at a glance see other information such as London being by far the most common assumed place of publication, with 183 comics out of the 233 or nearly 80%.

Hello World!

Posted 3 years ago by sfalkowski

Hello World!

The Lake 2007

I’m a PhD student in history at Western Michigan University with broad research interests from the ancient into the early modern eras, though primarily focused on the medieval Mediterranean and its cross-cultural and cross-religious interactions. Originally from northern Minnesota, I hold an MA and ThM in Church History from Saint John’s University in Collegeville MN as well as a BA in History and English from the University of MN – Duluth.

The purpose of this blog is to explore and showcase at least some aspects of the wide world of digital humanities as I experience and experiment with various tools, resources, and other information concerning the consequences and possibilities of digital innovation for history scholarship.

Text Encoding Initiative

Posted 3 years ago by sfalkowski

A Quick Introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium

The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium develops and maintains guidelines for encoding text-types most commonly used by humanities researchers into a machine-readable form. The organization began in 1987 with the first version of the Guidelines dating to 1990. The current Guidelines, known as P5, were first released in 2007 and are updated regularly every six months. Contributors to this project come from a wide range of countries and group affiliations. Within the TEI are numerous special interest groups working on developing the coding most relevant to their interests. Current groups for example include those working on East Asian/Japanese texts, graphs, manuscripts, and newspapers among others, developing standards for encoding these materials with all their particular specifications.