About Grade

  1. Overall concept and design: Helma Dik (Department of Classics, UofChicago)

  1. Technical execution: Harry Schmidt (undergraduate in the College, UofChicago).

News!

  1. Presentation at SNORTS (November; Harry)

  1. Presentation at Humanities Computing Open House (February; Helma)

  1. Loeb Classical Library Foundation support for ’06-’07

Innovative nature of the project

Grammars of different degrees of complexity currently live separate lives on bookshelves and on the internet (for examples of non-integrated web publication, see seelrc.org, which offers pdf files of full grammars for a number of Slavic languages, but also more in-depth treatments of case and aspect). This proposal is for users to be able to select the level of specificity on the go, as it were.

The Perseus project (perseus.tufts.edu) does offer user configuration in the form of so-called cookies, which set a user's default language, default font, and the like. However, Perseus derives most of its power not from this user configurability but from the linking of resources that were previously separate: Words in the texts can be analysed by the morphological parser, which in turn provides links to the lexicon, which in turn allows for further word searches, etcetera. Needless to say, the implementation of the current project must include a mechanism to link to Perseus resources. In turn, this project will provide added value to Perseus users.

More generally, this project is quite different from electronic texts published following TEI guidelines. These typically aim for rich encoding in order to achieve a faithful transcription of an original print publication. If the work is an original document in TEI, then the encoding is still very much for the purposes of the author: he or she chooses to encode the document so as to present it in the best possible way. Crucially, the current project uses the XML schema to allow the end user this flexibility at all times, so that this one grammar can become, in effect, all grammars to all people. For these reasons, we considered but rejected the idea of a fully TEI-compliant encoding schema - at the very least, we would have had to add many features to the existing guidelines, and would not have had any use for many others.

Work done so far

GUI for XML database

In alpha: The project now has a graphical user interface for its XML database, which allows for entry, update and management of the objects (grammar sections) and their hierarchical organization (grammar chapters and smaller sections) in the database (Figure 1) and for their encoding as specific types of information: text can be marked as examples, translations, notes, levels of complexity, tables, and lists (Figure 2). Authors can enter text in a standard browser (Firefox) without having to add in XML tags by hand. This makes for convenience for the authors but also avoids validation problems. The native XML database backend is based on Sleepycat Software’s open-source Berkeley DB XML 2, provides full support for Unicode UTF-8 and allows queries via XPath 2.0 and XQuery 1.0. Standard open-source tools are used throughout, including Apache and Perl.

Figure 1 Picture 4.png

Figure 2

Picture 7.png

In the editor, the following details are visible. The author edits the text in the box with the scrollbar. Above this box, the following items can be found in the top row (the bottom row is dedicated to tables and table editing):

  1. ex: selecting a typed in example, translation, and citation and then clicking this button results in the automatic application of the example format. Example text in source language is in bold, example text in target language is in italics, and citation is formatted into external reference link. However, this formatting is incidental compared to the possibility afforded to end users by encoding examples in this fashion: the user can choose to not show examples at all, not show translations, etc., in the ‘view options’ menu. The citations will end up in an index locorum, as well.  

  1. bulleted and ordered list: self-explanatory

  1. Italics symbol: adds <emph> tag, for highlighting parts of text, e.g. the relevant words in a long quote.

  1. Revert buttons - to undo or redo recent edits  

  1. Link buttons - insert, edit, or remove a link

  1. Broom: clean up code

  1. HTML: edit source

  1. The last two items on the right are in fact the most important. Here a paragraph or a header is assigned  its ‘depth level’ - this assignment determines when it will show up for the user.

Rendering Engine

In alpha: The rendering engine gets objects from the database and renders them. Users (that is, readers of the grammar) can browse through different levels of complexity, choosing to display more or less information with a click on ‘collapse boxes’ or by adjusting their preferences.

Figure 3 Picture 3.png

Users need administrative privileges to edit the database (see further below). Cookies will retain preferences during one session; we aim to allow for user registration so that if they prefer, users can store display preferences.

User registration and collaboration:

In alpha: The user database recognizes different levels of privileges for users. It permits those with administrative privileges to make changes to the database at will, subject to hierarchical controls that prevent changes to sections controlled by higher-order administrators (Figure 4).

Figure 4 Picture 5.png

A versioning system, at the bottom of the editing screen, guarantees the integrity of all documents in the system and permits users to compare prior edits of a given section (Figure 6).

Figure 5

Picture 6.png

Plans for 2006-07 (technical development only)

Summer 2006 : Prepare for beta-release.

GUI for XML Database:

•     Add encoding for bibliographical entries (now entered at level 10)

•     Build linking engine for primary and secondary source references once Perseus 4.0 is released

•     Build verifier for links.

•     Enable graphic objects (e.g., pie charts for frequency data).

Rendering Engine:

•     Expand capabilities of renderer for display, in addition to current options, preferences with regard to bibliography, links to glossary.

•     Create sidebar to display table of contents, glossary, bibliography, and index locorum.

•     Enable storing of user preferences: per-session cookies, permanent for registered users.

•     Formulate XSLT for export to pdf format.

October-December 2006 :

•     If funding becomes available for a server, interested other projects (there is discussion with faculty in Slavic and Urdu at the University of Chicago) can now get their own 'testbed' on this server. Solicit co-author beta-testers for Greek syntax.

•     Submission of paper proposal for ALLC-ACH (Humanities Computing conference) for Spring 2007.

January -March 2007

•     Incorporate extensions requested by authors and testers, and fix bugs reported.

•     If time permits, develop prototypes to demonstrate flexibility of concept for different types of XML schema and XSLT rendering options.

April-June 2007

•     Open source release of XML system at ALLC/ACH.

Demonstration (user end)

The GraDE website can be found at grade.uchicago.edu/grade

What follows is a tour that an unregistered user can also take on the website. For this demonstration, there is a grammar ‘fragment’ on the site on agreement of subject and verb in number (singular, plural). Please use Firefox as your browser; user preferences may not be functional with other browsers! We are working on cross-browser compatibility, but for now, it’s Firefox.

  1. On the grade site, Click ‘contents’ in the horizontal blue bar.

The following menu will appear (contrast Figure 1 above):

Picture 8.png

  1. Click on Subject-Verb Agreement.

The resulting document may be a little much to digest. If all is well, you see a lot of different examples, and perhaps you want the ‘For Dummies’ version? If so,

  1. Click on ‘view options’ in the horizontal blue bar.

Select level 4, and yes - yes - no in the menu. Do not forget to click ‘Change Settings’!

  1. Navigate back to Subject-Verb Agreement. Much of the detailed description has now disappeared, and you should have something looking roughly like this:

  Picture 11.png   

  1. Conclusion of the tour

You can experiment with the settings, and translations will disappear and reappear, more or less information will be visible, etc. [But rest assured that in the near future, the ‘view options’ menu will sit in the sidebar instead, for instant access].