What’s new on the web
I have been announcing it for months, it is there at last: our new interface! There are still a few details to be improved (the rollover with names poping up on the authors’ pictures or the new favicon that seems to have been lost in the process for instance), but this is mostly it. The general idea was to improve the aesthetics of the edition as well as the navigation. Here too, a few improvements still need to be done on the genres, topics and repositories main pages in order for their architecture to be made more obvious than the little column to the right allows it for the time being.
Having suppressed the structure in corpora and subcorpora has the inconvenient that it is not as clear as it was in the old interface who is the main editor of said corpora/subcorpora. I only realized it when I saw the final product, so that we are now working on adding a “quotation” button on each page that will let the user know how to quote each single document – and this way, inform said user about the name of the person who has the editorial responsibility of the text he/she wants to quote.
Since I have been tracking little mistakes all week-end long, I can’t feel the magic of the new interface’s novelty anymore. This is a pity, really. I have been waiting for this improvement for a long time and it is bound to remain our “face” for several years. Instead of enjoying it, I can’t help thinking of the next steps: actualize the Boeckh platform after this model and publish it officially, add more texts, add Boeckh’s books list, add the pdf button, update all headers and notes so they all are in the 3 languages,… since it will take about the 2 years we have left to just publish all the texts we have had in mind in the first place, there is little room for expansion and experimentation now. There is room for more neatness, more information, better access. I guess there is a time and place for everything…
Concerning experimentation, things are moving on a little bit too wildly for my taste in my Wikipedia class, but I enjoy too much the class’ enthusiasm to want to slow it down too early. We have a class blog, on which I post as well as the students, and on which I get comparatively about hundred times as many comments as on this one (which is an unfair comparison considering there are over 130 blog entries on this blog and not even 10 on the other). There are right now at least 3 blog entries on stack awaiting publication on the class blog: it happens to be quite complicated to teach writing blog posts and writing wikipedia entries at the same time. I might need to separate both in the future. But it is a completely new and exciting experience.
And the DH Berlin group is going online as well. The webpage is under construction, but at least it is there! Programm and flyer of the June workshop should be online by the end of the week.
In other words: no time to get bored…