medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
The Electronic Grosseteste has recently undergone a major upgrade. All texts have
been marked up in XML., making them more preservable and more efficient for
(eventual) searching. More importantly, the bibliography and the database of texts have
been integrated. Users can view a text, and then click on a link to see the relevant
bibiography. Search returns from the bibliography also list the works cited or
referenced, and there are links to texts on the site that in public domain. The URL is:
http://www.grosseteste.com/
There are still a few bugs to stamp out, mainly due to how browsers treat Unicode
(which it turns out is NOT universal!). Please let me know if you disover something
odd, or if a text has weird characters or is unreadable. I also know that there are one or
two dead links on the site (which I hope to vivify next week). I have tested the site on
IE6, Netscape7.2 (ignoring the AOL detritis as I went), and Opera 7. I don't recommend
using Netscape 4 or lower or IE5, since they do not fully support CSS (if that is
gobblygook to you, don't worry).
If the site is slow it will be mainly due to your connection or your ISP server. The search
algorithms, while not amazingly efficient (hey, I'm a self-taught Perl programmer), they
do complete bibligraphical searches in about 2/3 of a second. I hope to speed that up
early next year and get the return speed for searches to below half a second per query.
I regret to say that the general search engine for the database of texts is still under
development, but I hope to have that up and running in the next few weeks. With this
facility, users will be able to search both copyrighted and public domain texts (and
returns will include links to relevant bibliography). Googling the site won't help since the
texts are in XML, and may not be very user-friendly when displayed outside of the site's
CGI applications (although IE6 does have a built in XSL for XML files--yup more
gobblygook and acronyms--almost like scholastic theology...).
Please feel free to let me know if there is anything that need works or improvement. I
am treating you folks as my beta-testers. And if Microsoft can make money fist over
tentacle by releasing incomplete software, why can't I--release that is! ;-)
I look forward to your feedback.
Jim
PS. In addition to the shameless self-promotion herein, I should also note the
benevolence of St Louis University for the funding of this upgrade. It has been a long,
hard year, but at least the outcome looks pretty! -jrg
--------------
James R. Ginther
Associate Professor of Medieval Theology
& Director of Graduate Studies
Dept. of Theological Studies
St Louis University
3800 Lindell Blvd
St Louis, MO 63108
email: [log in to unmask]
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