[humanities-dev] New textus version deployed

Tue Jun 26 20:02:34 UTC 2012

One last thing: it would be *really* cool if you could navigate
backwards and forwards in the text with the left/right keys on the
keyboard. I think this would make a really big difference in terms of
user experience while reading.

J.

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 2:25 PM, Jonathan Gray <j.gray at cantab.net> wrote:
> This looks fantastic Tom!
>
> A few comments:
>
>  * Generally this works well - apart from a few minor bugs which I'm
> sure you're aware of (such as list of texts sometimes not loading
> properly, or loading very slowly). So well done!
>
>  * Feel like the UI/design has room for improvement. This should be
> beautiful, and make you *want* to stay on the site and read. There are
> loads of things to look up to in this regard, but my five top picks
> would probably be:
>
>    (i) substance.io
>    (ii) Internet Archive's book reader, e.g.
> http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/06/21/the-first-six-books-of-the-elements-of-euclid-1847/
>    (iii) davidhume.org, a nice example of presenting philosophy
> texts, simple interface, renders texts very beautifully:
> http://www.davidhume.org/texts/thn
>    (iv) Nietzsche Source - like davidhume.org this uses page metaphor
> of white box for text, around which is grey / darker coloured
> background: http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/JGB-233
>    (v) The White Review - http://www.thewhitereview.org/ - a site
> which *may* have been inspired by the Public Domain Review in its
> layout (it was designed by a friend of mine who knew and liked the
> PDR), but which typography looks very nice
>
>  * Regarding font/typography, feel like key ingredients would be:
> bigger default text, serif font (as this is standard for printed
> humanities texts), slightly thinner column - as the moment one risks
> losing one's line. Font on davidhume.org is nice, not sure about
> compatibility. Also White Review font is good.
>
>  * Functionality / UI wishlist:
>
>     - Toggle between single page view and scroll (so, e.g. I could do
> a plain text search in my browser if I wanted to, or scroll to find
> bit of text without having to click back and forth lots - the
> equivalent of flicking through a book at speed)
>    - Toggle annotations on and off - by default I'd like clean texts
> first, and annotations as an afterthought/supplement (e.g. if I don't
> know what something is, don't recognise an obscure word, want
> contextual information about something I'm not familiar with). With
> multiple annotations being shown, possible to toggle on/off by
> clicking on annotation?
>    - Toggle way to ambiently display the fact that a piece of text is
> annotated, without distinguishing between who made them (e.g. very
> light grey overlay). Kindle does this I think.
>    - The 'page forward' and 'page backwards' buttons I feel should
> naturally be strips either side of the page in the middle of the page,
> in addition to at the bottom of the page. This would also make it
> possible to use on a smart phone, which would be nice (at the moment
> it is hard to hit buttons at the bottom).
>    - Possible to have chapter forward, chapter back, and/or
> forward/back 5/10 pages?
>    - Options to change font size/style. Possible for users to choose
> their own in settings when logged in?
>    - With markup, do we have equivalent of title, h1, h2, etc.?
> Again, davidhume.org does this beautifully with the "IM Fell English"
> Google Web Font.
>    - Not sure about current colours, bevels and appearance of
> menus/interface. What about switching to standard Bootstrap top bar
> for now, which - although perhaps not the most exiting in the world -
> is thin, sleek and nondescript? I feel like this part of the design
> should basically be invisible to the user, and text display should be
> the centre of attention. Substance.io also uses something which is
> similar in size, appearance to Bootstrap for their top bar(s). In
> future, perhaps this is something that the user could customise
> (basically pick their own admin interface colours, like Wordpress).
>    - It is really important for users to be able to have some basic
> information about the texts. At the moment none of the translations of
> Plato list the translator as far as I can see. Ideally we'd have
> information about the specific edition that the electronic text is
> taken from, as well as the intermediary source (including URL) which
> might be Wikisource, Project Gutenberg, or elsewhere on the web.
> Important to have a way to track this provenance information. Also
> useful way to navigate to other related resources.
>    - As we can (in principle) have a URL to point to a specific piece
> of text, is there any way we could enable user to select a piece of
> text and get a URL?
>   - Minor aside: I get special character errors with this text:
> http://beta.openphilosophy.org/#text/zkl8mkycROyoSN_qyDgj6w/0
>
>  * Regarding bibliography pages:
>
>    - On the list of texts I think it should be possible to click on a
> item to see the bibliographic metadata for that item, and also to
> click 'READ' to go straight to the text view. This is important as we
> also want to be able to have bibliographic items for which we do not
> yet have full texts uploaded - so we can see what needs to be done.
>    - Ideally it would be good to be able to tell from items on the
> list view: (i) whether or not there is an associated text that you can
> read in TEXTUS, (ii) whether or not there are associated URLs for
> plain texts (not on TEXTUS, e.g. not yet extracted/marked
> up/uploaded), (iii) whether or not there are scanned images available.
>    - While I understand we won't be able to directly support
> transcription in this version of the project, it would be good to give
> users some sense of how they can get scans (e.g. from Internet
> Archive), upload them somewhere (e.g. Wikisource) and get started on a
> transcription. Also would be nice to be able to point to
> transcriptions in progress as 'resources' attached to a given
> bibliographic item. Sam and I could help to investigate this and
> provide some documentation. If this is there then users can *do*
> something if a text is missing and they really want to make sure it
> gets added to TEXTUS. A killer feature would be to enable some
> workflow for getting sections of a text up on PyBossa to enable
> crowdsourced transcription, and to feature a selection of these on the
> front page of OpenPhilosophy.org. ;-)
>    - Not sure whether we're planning to support arbitrary
> bibliographies (undergraduate reading lists, bibliographies for PhDs,
> articles or monographs), but would be good to have option to add texts
> to lists from text view and from bibliographic item view. Also would
> like to export bibliographies in a variety of formats - e.g. for use
> in Zotero, offline bibliography software, to embed in document in word
> processor, etc.
>    - Again - not sure of the status of this, but would be great to be
> able to export texts in a variety of formats (PDF, epub, mobi, etc).
>
>  * On upload/adding texts:
>
>    - Rufus wrote a nice script to import texts from Project
> Gutenberg, stripping out all header/footer text. Wonder if this could
> be useful, e.g. to import via URL as well as upload?
>    - Would be good to have a small link to a page that gives more
> detail about markdown syntax and uploading texts.
>
> I'll stop now. This email is already much bigger than I intended!
>
> Bottom line: excited about progress and can't wait to watch this
> develop further. :-)
>
> All the best,
>
> Jonathan
>
> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 4:14 AM, Tom Oinn <tom.oinn at okfn.org> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> There's a new textus build at http://beta.openphilosophy.org - data
>> store has been wiped so if you played with it before you'll need to
>> re-register. The new build is a halfway house towards better support
>> for bibliographic references (see recent blog here -
>> http://blog.okfn.org/2012/06/20/bibliographic-references-in-textus/).
>> In this build you can
>>
>> - review uploads before storing them (primarily to check whether the
>> markup is being correctly interpreted)
>> - assign proper bibliographic information to uploaded texts when reviewing
>> - search text (bibliographic) metadata through the embedded facetview
>>
>> - embed this text search in your own site should you wish (left as an
>> exercise for the reader - the 'bibserver-like' elasticsearch endpoint
>> is at http://beta.openphilosophy.org/api/texts-es?, point the okfn
>> facetview at this and you should see some texts. That or the server
>> will explode. Please don't make the server explode...)
>>
>> This iteration does not include reading list functionality but almost
>> all the groundwork for that is now done so it should appear soon[tm]!
>>
>> --
>> Tom Oinn
>> +44 (0) 20 8123 5142 or Skype ID 'tomoinn'
>> http://www.crypticsquid.com
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> humanities-dev mailing list
>> humanities-dev at lists.okfn.org
>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/humanities-dev
>
>
>
> --
> Jonathan Gray
> http://jonathangray.org

-- 
Jonathan Gray
http://jonathangray.org