Help with XSLT -- Suggestions Please!!

[rjp43]

Help with XSLT -- Suggestions Please!!

[ebeshero]

@RJP43 I am not sure from your XSLT where you are doing the work of calling up the appropriate SVG network graph for a particular article, and I haven't seen how you are incorporating PHP yet, so I am not sure where the association of files is happening. However, what you want to do should be do-able, if you can match a string of text in the SVG base-uri() with some part of a title element or base-uri() of the current XML file being processed. You can write a variable that identifies the appropriate SVG file by:

• locating that matching string using the relevant XPath function--probably contains() or matches(),
• and then adding around that matching string the literal text of pieces you need for the file path and file extension.

(And you can do that stitch work in XSLT or XQuery--you don't need to switch technologies.)

Since most of my days this week are being totally consumed by the TEI Technical Council and the PHP portion of this is unfamiliar territory, I want to call for backup help on this issue for Becca and Rob! May I ask @djbpitt to look in on this?

[RJP43]

@ebeshero @djbpitt I haven't yet actually called on it in the XSLT. So far the XSLT just takes care of all the other aspects of the text that need to be accounted for. I have not done anything yet to highlight our grammar markup because I was looking for suggestions, but I will give it a shot this evening after I finish a paper. I think I will go ahead and have the table alongside the text again, but I guess I was struggling with how to also have what's in the table be highlighted in correspondence to what's in the article text.

[ebeshero]

@RJP43 Okay, you know my thoughts on this, I think. Reduce the text at the top so we can access your interface more quickly. You need some kind of instruction or legend to be visible, but reduce the space of it, and I wouldn't use center alignment in that left-hand div. Try listing out the relevant information and instructions---will a bulleted list work there?

This is really a writing and organization challenge: Concentrate on prioritizing what's most important for your site visitors, and drawing the eye to the parts of the page they can interface with.

Is this a good moment to revisit the concept of multiple audiences for this project site?

• historians (like Prof. Kimball) who are interested primarily in labor history / women's history / Nell Nelson and don't care about the details of the code
• scholarly editors interested in your methods of textual scholarship
• digital humanities people / coders / students interested in learning from your code

I know your use of PHP is to guide people to different views of the Nelson articles based on their interests in
a) your research question: studying the language of possession,
b) learning more about the Chicago neighborhoods where Nelson did her interviews, and
c) comparing versions of texts to see what was dropped.

For a), weren't we discussing an integration of an SVG network graph filtered for each article to appear with the text of the article? In which case, were you going to position the network graph on the page, and balance it with a toggle-able reading view that highlights possessive language in the text? The HTML table might appear, then, beneath the network graph.

I think you might also be able to match the text contents of <g> elements in the SVG output of your network graph with language in the table and text, so you have a three-way JavaScript toggling in play. (You'd need to figure out a way to highlight a selected node in the SVG--maybe by drawing a border around it as we did in our old homework exercise from last fall. Here's how we highlighted by drawing a red border around an SVG element: http://newtfire.org/dh/WSGA_Web.html ) Worth a try?