STA Blog

09/13/10

By

  1. Presented work at STA meeting
  2. Began Drupal training with Kate and Prof Client
  3. Had a brief meeting with Suloni and Ran

Thursday Sept. 16th, 2010

By

11:30-12:00

Met with AJ to bring him up to date on the progress of humpty and future plans.

The two mock-ups will be done by next week and then proposed to Esther.

Wednesday

By

1-1:50

Submitted group banner proposals

Discussed more ideas for the humpty mock ups.

I will add color to the gray version.

I will make an additional version with a blue background and insert the simple egg icon and edit its colors.

Spencer Scorcelletti

By

8/25/10

  • Made edits to RCST

8/16/10

  • Met with Kate and Suloni for further instructions on Per_Urlaub
  • Met with Ran for further instructions on World Lit content adding
  • Finished adding all content to Per_Urlaub
    • Styled all text according to Urlaub’s powerpoint
    • Added div’s to “basic” and “interpretative” questions sections to function with JS

8/12/10

  • Added more content to Per_Urlaub
    • Resolved some of the JS conflicts
  • The content is going to require some styling

http://dev.laits.utexas.edu/d6_spencer/page/introduction

8/10/10

  • Started adding content to Per_Urlaub
    • Ran into some conflicts when the complexity of the information the JS would be displaying was increased
  • Touched up and started styling some of the JS boxes

8/9/10

  • Began work on coding for Reading Comprehension page turner
  • Met with Ran about China Rising site and received new deadline for Friday 8/20/10

8/5/10

8/4/10

  • Began coding of China Rising

8/3/10

  • Worked some more on fixing kinds with Per_Urlaub site

8/2/10

  • Met with Kate to get tutorial on using JQuery for accordion content for Per_Urlaub site and styling CSS for navigation to have unique background color per page upon hover
  • Worked on implementing JQuery based accordion to Per_Urlaub site.
    • Ran into some trouble though. Upon clicking on link to expand content, link color turns white, and no content expands.
    • Using the exact same code outside of drupal, the JS works great. Must be something wrong that I’m doing with Drupal.
      • Also, having trouble accessing the server. I wasn’t able to access the CSS.
      • Will follow up on this tomorrow

7/29/10

  • STA Meeting
  • Met with Sarah to go over OCR world lit editing

7/22/10

Feathers in my cap:

Black eyes:

  • Have not had time to finish javascript for expanding content within Per_Urlaub site
    • Will meet with Kate on that soon
  • have not had time to start working on the implementation of the PDF>OCR>TEXT>HTML>JS but will be meeting with Ran on the soon
  • Have not finished STA wiki cell

7/19/10

  • Met with Dave to go over details for coding of ChinaRising site

7/14/10

7/9/10

  • Worked on transferring raw PDF documents to PDF templates, to correct color issues and shadow popping up in the binding
  • Upon further review this process appears doable, but more time-consuming than the original digitization of the book itself and with inconsistent results of quality (a template for one scan may not be good for a different scan, + different genres [i.e. novel, poetry, etc…] have different formats and may require different templates and individual touching up.)
  • Investigated potential ways of optimizing the process and quality of text:
*Promising results have been achieved using Adobe’s built in OCR technology. Although each individual word, as well as character recognition, are nearly flawless (I would say 99%), the formatting is buggy.

The next step is to develop a reliable process:

  • Of rendering the text properly via the correct OCR settings
  • AND putting the text in a visually appealing as well as faithfu-to-the-text way.

This will most likely require a compromise between individually having a human format each page, and having an automated process, one in which the OCR automatically generates the text of the body, and a human manually puts the body text in the correct format.

7/7/10

Scanned and merged:

  • Oct 21 Goethe 2159-2182
  • Oct 26 Gothe 2183-2217
  • Oct 28 Goethe 2217-2263
  • Nov 2 Pushkin 2284-2305
  • Nov 9 Baudelaire 2420-2432
  • Nov 11 Proust 2674-2713
  • Nov 16 Woolf 2735-2746
  • Nov 18 Borges 2871-2881
  • Nov 23 Achebe 2931-3030
  • Nov 30 Achebe 2931-2980

Bulk of scanning is now complete. Now the process of correcting needs to begin.

Consulted quality of digitizations with Suloni and recorded her recommendations to Basecamp

  • Identified reading assignments that need to be redone

Made an appointment with Ming to begin training and overview for Humanities Institute site scraping

7/6/10

Scanned and merged:

  • Sept 23 1001nights 923-948
  • Sept 28 Dante 1010-1039
  • Sept 30 Dante 1060-1064, 1078-1082, 1130-1142
  • Oct 7 Montaigne 1502-1523
  • Oct 12 Shakespeare 1629-1671
  • Oct 14 Shakespeare 1671-1726
  • Oct 19 Basho 2108-2134

Met with Suloni briefly to get a brief overview on the Humanities Institue scraping project

7/1/10

Scanned and merged:

  • Sept 7 Meda pages 433-451
  • Sept 9 Meda. 451-465
  • Sept 14 Chuang Chou 555-565
  • Sept 16 Kalidasa 746-774
  • Sept 21 Kalidasa 774-811

6/30/10

  • Met with Sarah to go over scanning procedures
  • Came up with a workflow to improve scanning and merging
  • Scanned August 31 Gilgamesh 10-31 and September 2 Gilgamesh 31-42
  • Merged the above documents into single PDFs
  • Posted workflow ideas onto Basecamp

6/29/10

  • Fixed Nice-menu module CSS issues: The nice menu block going past the left sidebar block, the very faint grey background that was showing up on the “Training” link, as well as various lines sticking out randomly and entering the content.
  • Added a new favicon to the Per_Urlaub theme.

6/24/10

6/21/10

  • Added “nice-menu” module to site, with help from Kate. Edited .info file and added additional variable to PHP and CSS.

6/19/10

  • Worked on making some finishing touches to the CSS for Per Urlaub.

6/18/10

  • Continued editing CSS for Per Urlaub theming, as well as changing some of the PHP to fix some menu problems.

6/17/10

  • Began basic CSS theming for Per Urlaub site: backgrounds, margins, etc…, from 328 theme.

6/16/10

  • Assisted faculty for technology seminar: How to use Blackboard (continued): using Blackboard with Webspace.

6/15/10

  • Assisted faculty for technology seminar: On the fly video production.

6/14/10

  • Got permissions to the theming folder for the Drupal site. Started writing an outline for the Per Urlaub structure.

6/11/10

  • Worked on getting acquainted with Drupal by following Kate’s cheatsheet.

6/9/10

  • Assisted faculty for technology seminar: Webspace, UT Wiki/Blog tools, and other campus provided tools.

6/8/10

  • Went to photo lab to get green-screen photos for wiki.

6/4/10

  • Met with Chris to get training on scanning and color correction.

6/3/10

  • Met with Kate for Drupal crash course.

6/1/10

  • Orientation: Punching in/out, picked up key, introduced to wiki.