[open-literature] The 'complaints' list!

Sun Oct 24 12:17:46 UTC 2010

Dear all,

I've finally had a free moment to get on to Firefox before this afternoon's 
meeting... I'm going to attempt annotating for the first time as a guinea 
pig and see if I encounter any problems that need dealing with. Here 
goes...

ANNOTATING - all seemed to go well for the first 5 minutes, stuff already 
annotated appeared in blue and I was able to edit them and add my own... - 
...although whenever I clicked and attempted to edit, the page refreshed 
and flicked me back to the top, so I had to hunt down through the text 
again. - However, once I'd finished editing, it didn't seem to have any 
effect. The new thing I tried to edit didn't turn blue, and my editing to 
one of James's didn't turn up... - ...what's more, it immediately seems to 
have stopped working. It's now as if I were back on IE. Click annotate and 
it doesn't look the same at all. - One of the big problems is there are no 
clear instructions for annotating anywhere obvious on the site. I had to 
trawl through older new posts to find the ones that James posted there 
months ago - and that's because I knew they were there.

COMPARING TEXTS - when there are two different Gutenberg texts, like the 
Gutenberg vs. Gutenberg folio editions of Antony and Cleopatra, this works 
really well... - ...but whenever I select a Moby text, it doesn't appear 
clearly - I think the formatting in the PDF document is translating across 
and making it look messy. - Also, this raises a bit of a problem about the 
texts we're using - we've got an inconsistent number of texts for each 
play, and in many cases we don't have any of the main variations (neither 
of the 'Troilus and Cressida's includes the Prologue, for example). 
Comparing such variations is the main reason people'd use this resource and 
without them, it isn't fulfilling its potential.

SEARCH TEXTS (this is based mainly on my experience with trying to write 
Word of the Week's) - texts have non-authentic stage directions / scene 
notes in them. So when I'm searching for a word like 'tent' or 'palace', I 
get loads of instances that Shakespeare didn't use and have to trawl 
through. - also, it'd be really useful to have act, scene, line divisions 
for the plays, rather than simply rolling line numbers. Without them, it's 
hard to make the Word of the Week's look like scholarly articles.

Phew... Sorry that this is all so negative - and it may just be me being a 
total technophobe. Hopefully we can discuss all this with whoever's around 
at 3. See you then,

Jack