Quinn Dombrowski

In April, I switched to Ubuntu for my main (non-work) machine. One of the major hurdles in doing so was figuring out what to do about Flickr. I import, edit, and upload 200-ish photos a week, and I need a piece of software that lets me:

1. Change the title
2. Freely add tags
3. Add a description
4. Add the image to sets

Long story short, none of the Linux-native software I was able to get working (on 64-bit Jaunty or Karmic, or 32-bit Lucid) made the cut. Fortunately, the official Windows Flickr Uploadr (v. 3.2.1) installed flawlessly on Wine (v. 1.1.31)… but only on Jaunty and Karmic. On Lucid, it installs fine but throws an XULRunner error, “Couldn’t load XPCom”, that I haven’t been able to get around.

Largely because of this issue, I’m hesitant to upgrade my Karmic machine to Lucid. Solid Flickr uploading software is a must, and in Karmic, the Windows Uploadr works like a dream. On my work Mac, canceling an upload in Flickr Uploadr (intentionally, or through losing the wireless connection) not-infrequently meant losing all the work I’d done on the remaining photos, but the Windows version on Wine consistently saves data, even when you shut it down in the middle of an upload, or lose connectivity.

If you’re running Lucid, and the official Flickr Uploadr isn’t an option, here’s a comparison and description of the other software I tried. My recommendation on Lucid would have to be jUploadr– it’s a bit annoying to use, it has a number of shortcomings (see below), but the features are there and it won’t crash your machine.

F-Spot

I initially used F-Spot for importing images and automatically organizing them into date-based folders, like I used to do in Bridge CS4. Annoyingly, even though Ubuntu offers to import the photos using F-Spot when you attach your card reader, it’ll only do the date-based organization if you start the import from within F-Spot itself. I’ve switched to Shotwell (and so will Ubuntu, in 10.10) and been much happier with it.

F-Spot really falls short on the Flickr uploading front (Photo > Export to > Flickr). A bit of Googling appears to have confirmed my suspicion that you can’t rename photos in F-Spot– not to mention giving the photos new titles specifically for the upload. The tags you assign in F-Spot carry over when you upload the image, but you have to pre-populate the F-Spot database with the tags. I’ve got far too many tags for that to be plausible; additionally, the tags are only saved within F-Spot, so if you switch software, you lose your tags. You can add a description for Flickr in the “Comment” field (at the bottom in the “Edit Image” view), and you can fiddle with the privacy settings, but there’s no way to identify the content type or add the photo to a set.

Shotwell

As a photo organizer, Shotwell is a step up from F-Spot. Being able to assign comma-separated tags is a major improvement over pre-populating a database. Other than that, Shotwell suffers from all the same Flickr uploading shortcomings as F-Spot. No assigning titles (nor renaming the photo within Shotwell), descriptions, or sets; permissions are limited to visibility.

The worst part is, on my netbook running Lucid (10.04), Shotwell crashes as soon as I try to upload anything.

jUploadr

Of all the Linux-friendly software I’ve tried, jUploadr has one of the best sets of features. It meets all my requirements, and then some (it has a nice option for adding geo data).

The UI, though, drives me crazy. It distorts the preview of the images. I hate having to right-click on an image to get the metadata options to show up– and they do so in another window. And if it crashes, unlike the official Flickr Uploadr it doesn’t try to save your data. Worse, if you drop a group of photos in there, it uploads them backwards– the last one you put in is the first one that gets uploaded, which will mess up the chronology of your photostream if you don’t plan ahead and carefully drop your photos in there, one-by-one, in reverse chronological order. No sorting options or re-arranging available. It also doesn’t seem to always respect the metadata (available with some cameras) that indicates whether your photo was taken in portrait or landscape mode, so it won’t show the photos rotated in the preview. If you try to fix them yourself with the jUploadr rotate button, the upload will get screwed up as Flickr rotates them one more time. So just tilt your head while you’re adding tags.

Postr (Flickr Uploader), 0.12.3-1ubuntu2/0.12.4-2

Postr, the GNOME Flickr uploadr, might just be the perfect solution… if I could get it to work. The integration with the GNOME desktop is convenient, it meets all my criteria, but on my laptop running Karmic (9.10), shortly after I add an image and before I can do anything with it, I get flooded with “User timeout caused connection failure” messages that at times completely freeze up my whole system. It looks like it’s not the most common problem (Bugzilla still lists it as unconfirmed), so perhaps others will have better luck.

I managed to get it to work, briefly, on Lucid. One beautiful afternoon I was able to upload 11 photos. The experience could’ve been better– when you’re doing a multi-photo batch, it does tell you what photo it’s on, but not when you’re uploading a single photo there’s no way to tell if it’s frozen or actually uploading.

Unfortunately, the next time I tried to use Postr, I was flooded with error messages– different ones, about not being able to contact the host (no other programs were having connectivity issues), another message about a timeout. Often the error boxes would pop up without any text in them. More than once, it completely locked up my system and I had to do a hard reboot. Uninstalling, reinstalling, re-authenticating, nothing helped.

Thanks to a clever Sprint employee who secretly stockpiled the coveted phone for new customers, I’ve had an Evo 4G since the day after it was released. Despite foolishly accepting the first OTA upgrade, I was still able to use the original Unrevoked to gain enough root access to get android-wifi-tether working (thanks to this XDA thread), which has been fantastic while traveling.

It’s been over two months, and the release of Froyo and Unrevoked Forever motivated me to do some upgrading. The following is the step-by-step tutorial I wish I’d had going into the process. The assumption is that you’ve rooted, but not using Unrevoked3. The entire walkthrough is written with the goal of being as simple as possible for users who are new to doing their own updates, flashing new images, or even using Ubuntu.

Unrevoked3 on Ubuntu (9.10)

Installing Unrevoked3 on the Mac is easy– you download an installer package, drag it to Applications and run it. If you’re on Windows, I’d recommend using Ubuntu LiveCD with instructions by shad0wf0x. Since I run Ubuntu (Karmic/9.10, but should work equally well for Lynx/10.04), here are some instructions:

• Download Unrevoked 3
• Unzip reflash.tar.gz (you can double-click on it to open File Roller, and hit the extract button); the result is an executable called reflash. Let’s assume you extracted it in your Downloads folder. Now, run it as root by opening Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and typing in sudo Downloads/reflash. It’ll ask you for your password, and then it’ll launch Unrevoked3.
• The UI that comes up has the Unrevoked logo and the message “Waiting for device. Plug phone in now and enable USB debugging. You may require Linux root access.”
• Enable USB debugging on your Evo by going to Settings > Applications > Development > USB debugging and plug in your phone.
• From there Unrevoked3 just runs– it reboots a couple times, and drops you off in ClockworkMod recovery (a dark-colored screen with greenish text.) Select “reboot system now” by pressing the power button, and your system will restart.

Radio baseband and Wimax updates

When I compared my radio baseband version to those supported for Unrevoked Forever, I was dismayed to discover that mine wasn’t listed. Time for a radio update, and a Wimax update for good measure. Conveniently, after I installed these two updates I no longer had to remove the battery before I could turn my Evo on after turning it off– an annoying quirk that’d plagued me since I got the phone.

How can you tell what baseband version you’re running? You could restart your phone while holding the “volume down” button like the Unrevoked folks suggest, but it’s easier to look in the Evo UI: Settings > About phone > Software information > Baseband version.

• Go to this XDA thread and download Radio update: 2.15.00.07.28 and Wimax Update 26023 from the first post. These are two zip files, Radio-2.15.00.07.28.zip and Wimax26023.zip. Save them to the root of your SD card.
• Turn off your phone, and turn it back on while holding the volume-down button. This will take you to the bootloader, a white screen with some Androids on skateboards at the bottom.
• The instructions say you can use the volume keys to navigate between options; on my Evo, it wouldn’t let me do this for a few seconds, then it’d run HBOOT (a bunch of green text saying it’s looking for various things and not finding them), and when HBOOT couldn’t find anything then it would let me navigate to the other options.
• Choose Recovery, and press the power button. This will launch ClockworkMod Recovery (the same dark screen with green text as before.)
• Select install zip from sdcard, then choose zip from sdcard. Scroll down until you see either of the update zip files you’ve just added to your SD card. (Depending on how many files and folders you have on the root of your SD card, this may take a while.)
• Select the update zip file, scroll through all the “no”’s and select “yes”. The update will run.
• Be sure to reboot after each update– select +++++Go Back+++++, then reboot system now
• Repeat this same process with the other update zip file.
• To double-check if the update went through, check on your radio baseband version again, like before.

Unrevoked Forever and custom splash screen

One of my irrational fears is that one morning, as the alarm is going off on my Evo, I’ll fumble and accidentally hit the button accepting an unrootable OTA update. With Unrevoked Forever, you can still flash a custom recovery image if that happens, so I went to install it. (Update: it also lets you install AdFree, which you can’t do with a normal Unrevoked root.) This step isn’t necessary if you just want a rooted Froyo.

• Download the latest version — it’s a zip file, just like the radio and Wimax updates– and put it on the root of your SD card.
• Follow the same process as before, using ClockworkMod Recovery to install zip from sdcard.
• When you reboot, if you hold down the volume-down button and go into the bootloader, you’ll see SUPERSONIC EVT2-2 SHIP S-OFF at the top if it’s been successful.
• If you want a custom Unrevoked splash screen (their Unrevoked Forever logo in black, very tasteful, which will replace the HTC Evo 4G logo on startup), download PC36IMG.ZIP from their website. Put that exact file, same filename and all, in the root of your SD card.
• Reboot into the bootloader (holding down the volume-down key); this time, HBOOT will find what it’s looking for when it runs, and it will ask if you want to start the update. Choose ‘yes’, and then say yes to rebooting the device.

Installing rooted Froyo

I didn’t want to re-install all my apps and reconfigure my phone from scratch, so I first went in search of a backup option.

• Backing up your data: download and install MyBackup from the Marketplace. (The free version should be fine, so long as you’re not planning on taking more than 30 days to finish this tutorial.)
• Choose Backup, then Applications (or Data– you’ll probably want to do them both), then Local (SD Card). Select the apps you want to backup, give your backup a name and choose APKs + DATA. The process is essentially the same for backing up data.
• Acquiring the ROM: Download HTC OTA Froyo 2.2, *FINAL*, build 3.36.651.6 (Rooted) Odexed from the first post on XDA. It’s about 167 MB. Move it to the root of your SD card.
• Flashing the ROM: download and install ROM Manager from the Marketplace.
• Select Flash ClockworkMod recovery– it’s counterintuitive, if you’ve already run Unrevoked3, but necessary. Confirm your phone model, confirm the Superuser Request, and the app will do the rest of the work.
• Choose Install ROM from SD card and select the Froyo ROM you previously downloaded. It’ll give you check-box options for backing up your existing ROM and wiping the phone; certainly agree to wipe it, and you might want to back up your current ROM just to be safe.
• This will reboot your phone into ClockworkMod Recovery, where the backup, phone wiping, and Froyo installation will happen
• When the Froyo installation is done, your phone will go black, and you’ll see the HTC logo in Android green. My screen flickered to the horrible rainbow-colored default home screen for a moment, before going back to the HTC logo, when it kicked me into the setup screens for Froyo (using the onscreen keyboard, whether or not to allow Google location services, configuring e-mail clients, etc.)
• Getting your stuff back: download and install MyBackup again, and this time choose Restore. You can choose between Applications and Data, and then select the backup you made before.
• Restoring from MyBackup will return all of your apps and data, including your home screen layout and saved logins for your apps. I still had to re-configure the home screen for my browser, allowing the installation of non-Marketplace apps, etc., but it still saved me a lot of time.
• Wifi tethering: Froyo’s native wifi tethering is still under Sprint’s thumb, but android-wifi-tether didn’t let me down– I installed wireless_tether_2_0_5-pre8.apk, and it works great.

Many, many thanks to the Unrevoked team: Matt Mastracci, Eric Smaxwill, Matthew Fogle, Joshua Wise, Ryan Pearl, and Koush Dutta. Not only do they do incredibly awesome work, they also direct all donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. You guys are my heroes.

Birchbark letter XML

I have at least a first pass at the names-in-context data for documents 1-23, to supplement the proof-of-concept data I put together previously.

Medieval Slavic wiki

I’ve put together a work plan (subject to change) with the articles I’d like to try to incorporate into the wiki by October. After starting to go through the articles, it seemed reasonable to first work through the first chapters of Zaliznjak’s 2004 Древненовгородский диалект to have a framework with some general overview content that I can then flesh out with details, arguments, points and counter-points from the articles. To this end, I’ve added pages on the Old Novgorod and Old Pskov dialects, along with related pages as necessary.

Yesterday, a friend made the mistake of asking me why I switched from iPhone to Android, on an afternoon when I had some time to kill at the airport. His response to my long e-mail was that I should publish it on a blog somewhere. I’ve polished it up somewhat and added a few things, and the following is where I stand on the topic of device/OS choice.

Why Android?

For me, Android was an easy choice, simply on the merits of the device. It’s just– I think fairly objectively– better. I wrote and e-mailed this on my laptop, while wirelessly tethered to my Evo 4G– using a free app, rather than the extra-charge Sprint plan. On the bus, I was playing one of my favorite childhood video game, using a SNES emulator that would never make it into the iTunes store.

I have full root access. I can change the frequency of the processor to save battery life. I can flash new ROMs if I want; I’ll likely be installing Froyo, the new OS, well sooner than the phone manufacturer will make it available. I’m particularly looking forward to streaming music from my home machine without having it directly on the device, and Flash 10.1 support– two new Froyo features. Speaking of Flash, I enjoy being able to look at restaurant websites, a great many of which are Flash-based.

My Android happily ingests and displays video formats that would cause the iPhone to choke. I can transfer those videos, and any other media, to and from the device like a normal hard drive. It comes with free, built-in turn-by-turn navigation. I can fully customize the UI– themes, widgets, skins, multi-screen wallpapers. My Evo 4G has an 8 megapixel camera, and a 4.3″ display.

I personally think the hardware is better-designed, too: I picked up my old iPhone for the first time in a month today, and tried to figure out how the hell to do anything without the built-in “back” and “menu” buttons. No wonder Apple has such rigid design specifications in terms of how menus can be laid out and such: they’ve got to make up for their hardware sho‌rtcomings.

I can now get calls in my apartment– and pretty much anywhere else I’ve been in the last month– through Sprint. And their 4G in much of Chicago is better than my home DSL.

The iPhone 4? None of the above. I think the case for Android is an open-and-shut one.

Walking away from Apple

Less obvious, and less clear-cut, is my decision to eschew Apple in my personal life. It’s an unusual position to take, given the role that Apple plays in my work life. Everyone with a laptop in my group has a Mac. The computers in our mini “lab” for faculty are Macs. One of my people has been developing software for the Mac (and, more recently, iOS) since before I was born. I’ll be managing an adoption project for Project Bamboo that involves using scholarly servies via an iPad app, and one of our ongoing projects is investigating interesting scholarly applications for the iPad. I recently had lunch with the university’s Apple reps to talk about their role on campus, and what they can do to whip up some excitement about developing for the iOS platform.

The easiest and most natural thing would be to let Apple permeate my personal technological life as well. I already have access to some of their best, most “magical” products as part of my work. And I used them for quite some time, since I started my job, three years ago yesterday.

I haven’t thrown out the cobbled-together old PowerPC Franken-towers I inherited over the years (that would just be stupid– we use them as a TV replacement), but my husband and I are pretty committed to never purchasing another device from Apple. (As it happens, the only ones I’ve ever purchased myself have been two iPods and the iPhone in 2008.)

Other than when I end my day far away from my office, I leave my Macbook Pro at work. I have a laptop running Ubuntu, with a big Ubuntu sticker (and a smaller Tux sticker) on the lid– that’s my primary machine outside of work. I find it a little distasteful going out in public with my work Macbook; I do not want to be part of the walking ad campaign for Apple. A remark made at the most recent Bamboo workshop, about almost all the laptops in the room being silver Macs, made me wince.

Why, you may ask?

I’ve never been thrilled with Apple’s tight– and at times, seemingly arbitrary– grip over the iTunes store. I’m not a fan of their continued use of DRM on videos that people purchase. Or their inclination to restrict what people do with their hardware, like their efforts to brick jailbroken iPhones, or claim that jailbreaking a device is illegal. I was even less thrilled with their abuse of the patent system (yeah, I know everyone does it), applying for unreasonably broad patents and filing suit against HTC.

But frankly, the final straw for me was their change in developer policy for iPhone apps. To a certain extent, if you buy into the Apple world, that comes with restrictions. It’s a decision, it has consequences for the buyer, fine. But banning cross-compilers has an effect on the entire mobile ecosystem. Telling developers they have to choose– iPhone, the biggest platform, or other devices– will probably have a chilling effect on what’s available on all platforms. It penalizes people who haven’t made the choice to opt into the Apple world. A couple days after I heard about that announcement, when I’d had a chance to give it some serious thought, I sat down and bought a reasonably priced laptop that I could install Ubuntu on. And I’ve had no regrets.

This, though, I will say: Apple strikes me as a legitimate option. Ubuntu is getting much, much better than even a year ago, in terms of ease of use, working out-of-the-box, and not making people go to the “scary” command line to fix things. But when things don’t work, there’s still the need to do some troubleshooting in ways that most people aren’t used to, and I can understand why people who want nothing to do with tweaking any settings, who want something that other people will know and recognize and can help with, who aren’t “computer people” or willing to stick a toe into that world– I can see why they might want to go the Mac route. Windows, I don’t understand, other than as a side option for people who have to use Windows-only applications that can’t run on Wine. Why on earth would you choose both “proprietary” and “sucks”? The relative cost compared to a Mac is the only factor I can think of, though when my husband found himself in that situation a little over a year ago– needed a new laptop, couldn’t stomach Windows, couldn’t afford a Mac– it compelled him to try Ubuntu. He’s not the biggest techie by nature, but it only took him a week or two to become a huge fan of Ubuntu.

I’m not in that position, though. I’m a-okay with fiddling with things– hell, I even enjoy it sometimes! Freedom (as in speech) and openness are very important to me; I can’t really write code, but I license everything I do using Creative Commons. I’m not a fanatic– when there are applications I really need where the open source equivalents are simply not up to par, and if I have to choose between not getting the results I want and using proprietary software, I’ll go with the proprietary software. (I’m sorry, PicSay Pro on my Android has better brightness and contrast than GIMP. The ability to run Photoshop on Wine was non-negotiable for me when setting up my Ubuntu system.)

Why I support open source: an anecdote

Every now and again, something happens to remind me of the value of the open source community, rather than a tight-lipped corporation calling all the shots. I think it’s fair to say that the Mac developer in my group is one of the world’s Xcode experts. He’s even written two books on the topic.

But right after his last book went to press– when it was too late to make revisions– Apple announced development for the iPhone. Since his book didn’t cover iPhone development, this sudden and badly-timed news from Apple cut the book off from a large potential audience. And just a few weeks ago, as he was finishing up a new edition– 350 pages, ready to go– Apple announced Xcode 4 at WWDC. He has to start over.

Banning cross-compiling for iOS applications, keeping major changes under wraps and springing them on developers without giving them a heads-up that would allow them to make more informed choices, an iron fist of control over the only legit channel for obtaining applications, and an inclination to change the TOS for that channel to suit their own purposes– leaving people no real recourse if they don’t like those changes. Given all this, I cannot support Apple.

Thanks to Steve for prodding me to publish this, Google for releasing their Android logo under a Creative Commons Attribution license, Ben Bois for submitting an iPhone to OpenClipArt, and Randall Munroe for licensing xkcd under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

The frustrating thing about attempting a proof-of-concept for the birchbark letters is that many of the calculations I find most interesting need to be run over the entire corpus– which means a lot more data preparation than I currently have finished. The sample “names in context” (NIC) XML only has entries for 42 documents, so there’s a lot of work yet to be done.

Characterizing the context for different kinds of names

I’ve written the XSLT to do a number of calculations– how often are women mentioned in the context of some kind of financial transaction? When women are mentioned in a financial context, are they more likely to be referred to by a derivative of their husband’s name than when they are mentioned in other contexts? Are there contexts where certain kinds of names– “church” names, non-Slavic names, female names– appear with particular frequency, or not at all? Unfortunately, the output is meaningless until the full NIC XML is ready.

Building charts and graphs

I can see writing code to enable the user to generate– and, more importantly, compare– charts and graphs like those found on p. 26-33 of Zaliznjak 2004, but with greater detail. Within a given date range, is there a statistically significant difference between how frequently the jer merger, or cokan’e, occurs when the writer has a non-Slavic name, vs. writers with Slavic names? It didn’t seem worth doing for this particular proof-of-concept, though; the only data set I could draw on for this would be the index of all the documents and their dates, and a chart showing how many documents were found in each 50-year time span or what-have-you doesn’t seem worth the effort.

Actual results: names and genders

For some usable– if not the most exciting– results, I’ve turned to the fully-prepared index of names, which does allow for certain kinds of calculations. Keep in mind, all of these below refer to unique names, not instances of use (“Khrestina” appears 5 times, but is counted once for these calculations; I don’t have the NIC data ready yet to account for multiple instances.)

• 10.7% of the names with an identified gender are female (87 names).
• 35.6% of the women’s names that are used are derived from a male name, presumably their husband (31 names). There’s an opportunity here to go fishing for the equivalent male names from the same time period and location, but my initial guess at reconstructing the male names suggests that there’s no attestation– contemporary with the woman’s name or not– of the male name in about 25% of the cases.
• 12% of all names have no identified gender (110 names). One of my goals is to assign probable genders to as many of these as possible, after establishing the contexts where men and women are more likely to appear.

Actual results: Boris

When deciding how to build the sample NIC data set, I chose to include all documents that reference the name Boris. I wanted to see how I could organize the available data to facilitate the task of determining how many Borises are represented in the birchbark letter corpus, and my initial pass at 12th century documents surfaced 5 documents mentioning “Boris”.

What information is useful to help differentiate one Boris from another? I’ve listed each document where the name occurs, and sorted them using the earliest conditional date proposed. I’ve included the location where the document was found, but to put that information into the right context, it’s important to know Boris’s role in the document. Particularly where he’s a sender or 3rd party, documents referring to the same Boris could easily be found in different locations. The value of the additional information concerning Boris’s role varies; one could argue that whether he owes money or not is fairly inconsequential, but information indicating that the reference is to Saint Boris, or that the Boris in question has recently died are crucial the task at hand.

So how many Borises are there? Probably somewhere between 10 and 12.

• Saint Boris – BBL 906
• Boris of the early 12th century – BBL 742; 40-60 years between this Boris reference and the next one make it unlikely that it’s the same Boris
• Boris(es) of the late 12th century – BBL 237, 806, 581, 671, 819, 935 all range from 1160-1200. Two letters to a Boris (581, 819) and two where Boris was a third party (806, 935) were found in Troick. E, which may be a reason to connect those with a single individual. Other than BBL 237, from Nerev., all the other documents from this time period are from Troick.
• Boris of the turn of the 13th century – BBL 935 could plausibly be grouped in with the above if positioned on the earlier side of its 1200-1220 date range.
• Boris Miloslavov – BBL 343, 1280-1300
• Boris Pjantelejev – BBL 263, 1360-1380
• Boris Petarev – BBL 701, 1360-1380
• Boris(es) of the late 14th century – BBL 579 (Nutn., from), 744 (Feodorovsk., 3rd person); could be any of the two Borises above, the one below, or someone else.
• Boris and Nastas’ja – BBL 43 (1380-1400) and BBL 49 (1410-1420); BBL 43 features him giving orders to his wife, and BBL 49 is his wife complaining about his death.

The next step– assuming we had a full data set– would be to look at the names that co-occur in documents, to try to build up a “social network”. (The results may also help fine-tune our identification of individual Borises.) Some kind of “point system” would likely be involved to weight the connections between people, say, 5 points between a writer and an addressee, 3 points between the writer/addressee and each of the third parties in a document, and 1 point between each of the 3rd parties. I haven’t by any means worked out the details, and am enthusiastically open to ideas and suggestions for how to handle that part, but there’s a lot of data left to be entered before the project reaches that point.

To enable a more interesting proof-of-concept for the birchbark letter XML project, I’ve spent the last week making a new, limited data set (all documents from 1100-1120, plus some documents with the same names from the 12th century, and all the documents that include the name Boris) that lists all the names that occur in a given document and characterizes their role in the document. For the time being, I’m calling it “names in context” (NIC).

I’ve been adapting the schema every time I come across some new aspect that seems significant. Each document contains one or more elements, which include:

• A name
• Optionally, a “second name”– sometimes a patronymic or city of residence used to specify which Ivan is being referred to
• A role (“to”, “from”, or “3p” for 3rd party), and more optional details:
  • financial
    • gen – general, mostly for lists of names and amounts without any context
    • owes
    • owed
  • orders
    • giving
    • receiving
    • report
    • an optional “polite” attribute to indicate particularly deferential language
  • personal — might get renamed to other if the “scope creep” continues like this
    • advice
    • complaint
    • news
    • death
    • religious– for when the names refer to saints
    • gen
    • optional “polite” attribute here, too
• A section for relatives of the person:
  • Their relation (mother, father, brother, etc.)
  • All options for the relative’s role, as listed above

To illustrate, here’s a few sample entries:

BBL 49: from Nast’ja to her brother

Conveying the news of her husband’s death

<bbl_names>
<id>49</id>
<person>
<name>Настасья</name>
<role pos="to">
<personal>news</personal>
</role>
<fam>
<relative>
<relationship>brother</relationship>
<role pos="to">
<personal tone="polite">news</personal>
</role>
</relative>
</fam>
</person>
<person>
<name>Борисъ</name>
<role pos="3p">
<personal>death</personal>
</role>
</person>
</bbl_names>

BBL 736а: Ivan and Dristliv

Ivan tells Dristliv to collect money from Pavel and Prokopii.

<bbl_names>
<id>736а</id>
<person>
<name>Иванъ</name>
<role pos="from">
<orders>giving</orders>
</role>
</person>
<person>
<name>Дристливъ</name>
<role pos="to">
<orders>receiving</orders>
<financial>owed</financial>
</role>
</person>
<person>
<name type="adj">Павелъ</name>
<role pos="3p">
<financial>owes</financial>
</role>
</person>
<person>
<name>Прокопии</name>
<role pos="3p">
<financial>owes</financial>
</role>
</person>
</bbl_names>

I was hoping to delay this until I had the Subversion repository ready to distribute the first versions of the XML, but setting it up is taking a bit longer than I anticipated. I’m working on a proof-of-concept for the kinds of analysis that can be done using the name and date indices together; I’m hoping to finish it in about a week or so. Here’s the current status of the deliverables as of 20 June 2010:

Date index

A preliminary version is done and ready for release. It contains all the documents and all the different proposed date ranges found in Zaliznjak 2004 and gramoty.ru. A sample entry:


<bbl_date>
<id>380</id>
<year_ne m="услов">1140</year_ne>
<year_ne m="страт">1135</year_ne>
<year_ne m="внестрат">1100</year_ne>
<year_nl m="услов">1160</year_nl>
<year_nl m="страт">1170</year_nl>
<year_nl m="внестрат">1190</year_nl>
<year_pref_ne m="внестрат">1100</year_pref_ne>
<year_pref_nl m="внестрат">1140</year_pref_nl>
<loc>Нерев</loc>
<loc_id>И-1</loc_id>
</bbl_date>


Name index

Finished, other than the metadata about whether a name is attested elsewhere, compositional, or none of the above. A sample entry:

<name gen="m">
<form>Матфѣи</form>
<adj>Матфѣѥвъ</adj>
<patronym>Матфѣѥвичь</patronym>
<alt>Матьфѣи</alt>
<rel>Мафѣи</rel>
</name>


Names in context

Starting work on this index (which shows all the names found in each document, and the role they play) is the next step in building a proof-of-concept for the work on the BBL names sub-project.

Unicode word index

Completed through page 62 out of 113.

Word index with vowel etymology

Pending completion of Unicode word index.

As a way of setting an actual deadline for myself to make some progress on the Medieval Slavic wiki, I submitted an abstract to the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Slavic Linguistic Society, which follows.

The rise in scholarly materials accessible through Internet (JSTOR, SpringerLink, and/or PDFs published by individuals) has facilitated the research process for scholars worldwide. For Slavic linguists, however, many of the major reference works were published over 50 years ago, and are unavailable electronically. The success of Wikipedia as a general reference source for laypeople illustrates the potential of wikis as a way of organizing information from diverse sources. This paper aims to make the case for developing a separate wiki as a shared reference resource for Slavic linguists.

While on­line publication of materials lowers one barrier to access, the research process itself has largely remained the same. It is often necessary for scholars to seek out information from areas where they are less familiar with the literature. This can involve consulting a reference work and tracking the topic through bibliographies. The amount of time necessary to look up facts takes away from the time the scholar can devote to the intellectual content of their research.

A common approach to solving this problem is scanning materials. However, a tremendous amount of tedious work is involved in this process, and copyright is a non­trivial concern. A specialized wiki, compiled by Slavic linguists and Slavic linguistics graduate students, would reduce both tedium and copyright concerns, as the facts and conjectures contained within monographs and articles are not themselves subject to copyright.

A test case is currently being developed, limited to topics relevant to medieval Slavic linguistics. The wiki contains two kinds of content: article/monograph summaries that lay out the major claims of a particular work, and topic-­based pages that bring together both undisputed facts and various conflicting scholarly claims on the topic, drawn from articles and monographs. Both kinds of wiki pages include copious, specific footnotes referencing the source material­­ both to enable fact­-checking and to allow the scholar to cite the original material rather than the wiki if desired.

Mediawiki, the wiki software developed for Wikipedia also used for this test case, includes a number of features aimed to both encourage contribution and prevent abuse. Each user account comes with a page linking to that user’s contributions on each of the pages where they have added (or removed) something. Even scholars without any specialized technology skills can contribute to the wiki, and include the link to their contributions on their CV to show their involvement in a digital humanities project. Every change made to a page is tracked in the database, and can be viewed, discussed, and/or reverted in cases of blatant abuse. The common graduate student assignment of writing article summaries could be redirected slightly towards writing summaries for articles not currently on the wiki, and breaking the information in those articles down into specific claims that can be added to topical pages encourages students to develop their analytic skills.

In addition to arguing for the benefits such a wiki could provide the Slavic linguistics scholarly community, this paper will present a live demonstration of the Medieval Slavic linguistics wiki.

For the NITLE Summit 2010 poster session, I combined my Medieval Slavic wiki with the work I’ve been doing as part of Project Bamboo. You can download the poster I put together here (PDF, 650 kb); the abstract is below:

Even in a time when digital information can be accessed, searched, and filtered quickly, a number of academic disciplines rely heavily on print-only reference works and associated articles, many of which are not available on-line. Pulling together various scholars’ assessment of any topic is painstaking work, taking up time that could be better spent on analysis. At the same time, article summaries are a common class assignment, but the students’ work may never be seen by anyone other than the instructor. What if we could reduce the amount of scut work necessary for scholars, while making student assignments more meaningful?

Medievalslavic.org is designed to be a working model of what such a system might look like. Using the Mediawiki platform, I am in the process of dissecting commonly-used reference works in medieval Slavic studies into cross-linked articles, and incorporating dissenting views, supporting evidence, and other insights fromWikifying Reference subsequent scholarly articles. Heavy page-level citation of the sources, just as one would find in a scholarly article, both ensures that all the information can be verified, and allows the scholar to cite the source–rather than the wiki–to avoid criticism from traditionally-minded colleagues. I also plan to illustrate how this project aligns with the future directions for digital scholarship mentioned during the Project Bamboo workshops, with the hope that someone in a larger field might be interested in trying something similar with a class of current students.

On April 17, 2010, we gave a talk on the Bulgarian Dialect Atlas at the Balkan and South Slavic Conference at the Ohio State University.

You can download the handout (PDF, 971 kb), or flip through the slides below.