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TTWR Roadmap Winter Spring 2020
Theater that was Rome ( https://library.brown.edu/projects/rome/ )is hybrid project, drawing on materials from 2 main sources:
- Documents in the BDR - some are part of Brown's Special Collections, others are digitized books and prints that are owned by Vincent Buonanno.
- Annotations, essays, biographies and other enhancements added by the researchers.
People
- PI: Evelyn Lincoln (History of Art and Architecture)
- CDS Project Lead: Elli Mylonas (information architecture, project design, dogsbody)
- DT contact: Ben Cail (approve student pull requests, intervene when direct action in BDR is necessary)
- CDS student programmers supervised by EM
- Graduate and undergraduate assistants who are supervised by Evie Lincoln.
- Consultation with cataloging when necessary
Repositories and issues
- Code Repository: https://github.com/Brown-University-Library/ttwr
- Code issues are in this repository
- TTWR project drive. Has several documents with lists of corrections or problems: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B13gonNAATNSbndTV1JpYnEwSjQ?usp=sharing
- Some data issues are in the TTWR Github code repository, but not all.
The goal of the project is to collect and make available engraved books and prints that were printed in or are about Rome from the 16th to the 18th centuries in order to study the history of the books and also the networks of printers and print shops in Rome that produced them.
This project began as an STG Faculty Grant in 2006, and has been worked on at intervals since that time. The first robust version was developed by Elli Mylonas, Cliff Wulfman and Patrick Yott, using an early version of the Exist XML database and data structured in XML, MODS and METS. TTWR and the early version of the BDR (repoman) were being developed at the same time, and the image viewing presentation for books in TTWR became one of the repository viewers. When the current version of the BDR was developed on the Django platform, TTWR was also ported to Django, and integrated more directly with the BDR (The Django port was underway by 2013). Some of the interface features and functions still reflect the original technologies and forms of navigation.
Currently TTWR provides an independent interface for browsing and studying the TTWR collection in the BDR that uses the BDR API to retrieve images and metadata.
- Books and prints are each listed on a separate page and can be sorted by various characteristics (Date, Author, Title) and in whether they are part of the Chinea series of prints or the Buonanno collection.
- Any page (print or book page) may be annotated using a very structured form. This looks like the information in a catalogue raisonée - identifying engravers, printers, patrons, transcribing any textual component of a print, and providing a brief description. Annotations are created as a BDR object and associated with the page object.
- People mentioned in the annotations or elsewhere have short biographies written by Evie and her students. These are loosely structured and are stored as part of the Django database. They are accessible through an admin interface. People entries have an ID and can be programmatically linked from book pages or prints. People also have occupations, which are managed by a controlled list that is also in the Django databases and accessed through an admin interface.
- More detailed information about a book page or print can be written as an essay or a note (short essay). These can refer to book pages or prints and appear on the associated primary source page. They are stored as part of the Django database. They are accessible through an admin interface.
- There is an admin interface that provides access to static pages (Links, About), and to the CMS which is used to manage People Bios, Essays and Notes, print shops, Primary source documents for print shops, and the controlled vocabulary of occupations for people. This is used by Evie Lincoln and her students, so that they can add, edit or correct information at any time.
In summer of 2018, year, we began working on a whole new component that explores the history of and documents about Roman print shops, which draws on material from another scholar, Francesca Consagra. Consagra, a colleague of Evie's, is recently deceased, and gave her research materials to Evie.
Work on TTWR consists of clean up and reconciliation of book metadata, some of which was entered into the BDR with many errors, and some of which was entered into Josiah with inaccuracies, and of developing the new print shop component of the website. Ben Cail has been in the role of staff programmer who provides quality control and BDR assistance to student work. He has stepped in to help with some TTWR features, especially ones that interact with the BDR, and has worked with students in that he is responsible for reviewing and accepting pull requests, and is therefore familiar with the codebase. All other coding has been carried out by student developers and management of features, prioritization and overall planning is managed by EM. During active work phases, EM meets regularly with Evie and any of her assistants, and also with the student developer. The last time any development work happened on the project was August 2019. It is very likely that we will continue to work on the project, to develop the print shop component or to add features that allow the collection to include materials beyond is held by Brown and Vinnie Buonanno. However, there are no active plans to move forward with this at the moment.
- Correct all the entries that have bad descriptions-mainly Chinea prints. Evie has annotated printouts. This is an extensive job that is actually changing BDR metadata. (EM about 20 hours). It would be convenient if we could hire Charlie Steinman to do this over the summer. It would take him about 20 hours. Charlie is an undergraduate with encoding experience who reads Latin.
- Work with cataloguers and BDR programmers to figure out ways to handle books bound together in the TTWR interface.
- Work with Evie on duplicate people entries (summer)
- Go through all the old bug lists and problem reports from Evie. See what needs to be done.
This work has not progressed since August 2019 when Zak Ziebell completed the first pass. Evie will eventually want to continue this work, but has not been in touch. This may happen over the summer as she is more able to turn her attention to the project when classes are not in session. It would be most productive if Evie and her grad students could first add more documents and print shops so we can test the existing work.
The print shop section is in a preliminary state and would require more planning and speccing before we do much more work on it.
Materials that are held by Brown have all been cataloged and are in the Josiah. BDR metadata is derived from the library cataloging, and follows library cataloging rules. This is not always appropriate for the type of access and re-use that platforms like the BDR expect. Examples of this are books that are bound together or handling of multivolume works. Cataloging conventions retain archaic printing (V/U, J/I) which make searching and sorting difficult. Finally, there are errors in the library cataloging.
Materials that were provided by Vincent Buonanno don't have Josiah records, they just have BDR metadata which was created mainly by Ann Caldwell (retired), who was not an expert in books of this time. The BDR MODS have mistakes, and some of the records which were made for the early BDR (repoman) are not very complete.
I can edit the MODS metadata for these materials so they reflect what the PI indicates is correct information. However, this would create a divergence between Brown cataloging and the BDR for Brown holdings - so I prefer to only edit the Buonanno metadata. This has been a recurring problem and the best way to solve it may be to not display Brown metadata at all. Just link the item in Josiah.
Deciding how much to structure and automate the source material that is being added to the print shop section. Currently we are using Django as a CMS, and providing some minimal metadata for the print shop documents transcribed from Francesca Consagra's research. They are encoded in markdown. Clusters of documents that are associated with a printer or shop are then linked using IDs. This is very easy and comprehensible for scholars, but is not scalable. Also Markdown is even more impoverished than HTML for managing historical documents.
At the moment, we have settled for less structured data and links and are making it possible for the scholars to interact with material and see progress.
Evie Lincoln will want to continue her work on print shops and the documents that may be used to research them. The documents may be transcribed, ingested as PDFs or linked to printed versions in Google Books. When she has time to spend on the project, we will be able to plan how these relationships are shown and navigated on the TTWR site. At that point it may be worth it to develop a better set of data structures.
TTWR sources are currently limited to whatever is in the BDR and there are many other books that contribute to this corpus in online collections. The project would be even more interesting if it were possible to aggregate online sources from outside the BDR. These could be accessible via API, or just simple links if there is no API. Evie Lincoln has raised this possibility in the past, and has demonstrated the need for it in work she has presented, where she draws on a variety of sources. This would be an interesting development.