Updates & New Devlog

[Jubal]

PHP converts between numbers and strings implicitly - cypher/neo4j doesn't. This wasn't a problem until I needed to sort numbers above 10 and found my sorts were going, "1, 10, 11, 2, 3, 4" because text-sort order. I think I've basically fixed it now anyway. This is why I'm only adding records to the database very slowly!

[Jubal]

Update: I now have the basic event pages & nodes set up with editing facilities. The most important aspect of these - the dating system - is still not done, but you can view events and tag people in them. I may leave the date system for a while yet because when I get to doing it I want to work out a good visualisation & editing interface and how the program will "streamline" the data from the rather disparate graph.

[Jubal]

Been making horribly slow progress lately I did finally make a small nudge forward today, by getting the "assumption" switch added to identity links. This signals whether an identity is assumed or attested. For example, if someone has an identifiably Georgian name/ancestry and is fighting for the Georgians and has land-holdings in Georgia, the chances are that such a person is an Orthodox Christian. Chroniclers wouldn't have noted such identities down, because they were assumed at the time - and as such we have to make some educated assumptions about them now to paint an accurate picture of the Georgian court. If I've actually got a definite reference for something, it's instead put down as attested. This, once I've amended the search functions to use it, will allow users an easy way to filter out my assumptions from the data-set if they want to.

[Jubal]

The "place" nodes now have their pages viewable and editable. The next step for these is to add functionality for defining coordinates (for point-places) or polygons, as well as place nesting, whereby I'll be able to link places up within a tree such that place X should be treated as within place Y (and so on). Whilst at some point in the distant future I may want to do fancier things regarding the relative positions of places, for most database use I think the actual positional location will mainly be used for deploying it onto map readouts, via "event" nodes (which will also have their own attachments to places).

One of the major UI things I need to do for the database in the near future is predictive searching and other things to make the data inputting work easier. Much of the current set relies on creating links between nodes with different id numbers, whereas for the sake of speed I will probably need ways to put links in that rely on more memorable features such as event names.

[Jubal]

Coordinate boxes added, including it rejecting anything that isn't a number, and a bit more of the editing interface for "nesting" places and connecting places to events (which I'll hopefully have finished by the end of tomorrow evening).

I'm wondering if I should make the coordinate boxes also reject numbers that are clearly outside the Caucasus region, as a check against typos...

[Glaurung]

I'm wondering if I should make the coordinate boxes also reject numbers that are clearly outside the Caucasus region, as a check against typos...

Probably a good idea - maybe pop up an "Are you sure?" message rather than an outright rejection, just in case there are genuine situations where people want to input such data.

With an eye to future use by people studying other areas, you could make it more flexible - if you can have some sort of system set-up data somewhere, design it so that the people setting up the prosopography system input the limits themselves at the start of their project. Then the system checks input data against these numbers, rather than any limits embedded in the code. You could have similar limits for dates too, I guess.

[Jubal]

I think for the moment I'm focussing on "what am I going to need this to do" - tweaks like that to make something more general-purpose deployable shouldn't be too hard to put in at a later stage if needed, given the structure of the thing. The number of data types really isn't very big, so going in and fiddling with a parameter manually in the code if I need to is perfectly possible.

Anyway, you can now add a location to an event, and they're restricted to one location each. I also did some UI improvements to make buttons and status messages say what they do better (there's been enough copypasting that, for example, the "add item" pages all had "edit" as their bottom button, which has now been fixed.)

I don't currently have any duplication checks for nodes etc, which could be a problem at later stages, but I suspect that duplicates may be best dealt with post-hoc by means of a few specific duplication-search features, rather than trying to pre-emptively set up "smart" systems to warn of them?

[Jubal]

Argh, haven't updated this for ages. I've now done my first pass over the info from The Chronicle of Giorgi Lasha and The Life of Tamar, and I'm now doing the section on Tamar in the History and Eulogy of Monarchs. This third source is by far the most detailed of the three parts of the KT that document Tamar's reign, and it's definitely presenting some new challenges - unlike other similar databases, I'm "pre-analysing" most of the information, and arguing a case for one or another interpretation where things conflict (whilst also, where possible, allowing users to tweak and prefer a different interpretation), which is necessary to allow the more powerful analytical functions I want the database to ultimately have but is definitely a big block of the work.

[Jubal]

I literally finished the History and Eulogy today, and it still needs some cleaning. It's taken me far longer than I feel it should've done and I'm sure I've not done it as consistently as I'd like, I'm going to need to do some retroactive application of some rules to make things a touch more consistent.

Next stage though is a bit of data cleanup then work in the analytical tools - I want to get the front end useable before I dig into the reign of Giorgi III (the reigns of Tamar plus her father Giorgi is my minimum hoped for scope for the project).

[Jubal]

OK, so this semester I'm required to complete a Forschungstagebuch for one of my two doctoral seminars. Given I'm required to be regularly writing up my research progress anyway, I'm going to try and use that as an excuse to keep copies here and thereby keep this devlog up to date for a while and talk about my research a bit more. My plan is to do this on a weekly basis: I'll do the first update in the next day or two.

[Tusky]

OK, so this semester I'm required to complete a Forschungstagebuch for one of my two doctoral seminars.

What is this term:: Forschungstagebuch? Is it a commonly used one? I've not come across it before

[Glaurung]

It's German. Forschung is "research"; Tagebuch is literally "day book", so "diary", "journal" or "log". I guess "research log" would come closest, as I'm not aware of a standard English term.

[Jubal]

Yes, research log/research diary would be the translation.

[Jubal]

OK, first notes for the week up to Friday (ending 9/10):

Writing & Data
Added about 500 words at the weekend to the overall text, on the topic of women in the texts. This will need significant further work and expansion, but at least sets out the central thesis on that front, which is that Tamar's exercise of power needs to be somewhat de-exceptionalised and understood in the context of a Caucasus in which women already often held significant if inarticulate forms of power.

Reading

• Continuing to work my way through the Shahnameh, mostly going through the stories of Sam and the Simorgh, and the story of Zal and Rudabeh.
• Obtained a new book, "Ani at the Crossroads", conference proceedings. Had a brief skim but will need to work through numerous chapters in much more detail.

Skills
Attended first two East European Doctoral Seminar sessions, including notes on time management & prioritising research and papers rather than emails, which guilty as charged (though see below for this week's particular issues). Also some notes on Centre for Doctoral Studies training courses, which I should check out if I have time - maybe more a thing for next semester given current workloads.

General notes
Overall a difficult week from a research perspective due to start of teaching, start of East Europe seminar with two sessions, major meetings incl. 3 and a quarter hour project meeting, and family issues. Nonetheless some reading and writing done and hopefully next week will be less chaotic.

[Jubal]

10-16 Oct

Writing and Data

Added new entries further into the Orbeli rebellion. In particular, worked through the names list of rebels in the History of Sisakan and compared to Brosset's identifications – agree on some, others seem far too much of a stretch.

Unsolved mysteries: location of "Saxate", some names of Ivane's faction.

Created new batch files to make opening the database systems faster, fixed "add new element" files which closed the database connection too soon. The latter should be the last part of the database upgrade process from some weeks ago.

Note for next week: I really need to make a front-end system for the map maker, because typing in the whole query by URL is a pain.

Skills

First session of Ancient, Byzantine, and Medieval cluster colloquium: mostly went over people's research interests and the utility and problems of field boundaries.

Third session of East European Doc Seminar: Focus on CV writing and abstracts. CV notes about UK quals not being universally understood are important to remember.

Reading

Further parts of the Shahnameh, the start of the Iran/Turan war and rise of Rostom including him gaining his special horse. Reading Shahnameh with a map handy might help, I'm not familiar enough with the geography and nomenclature (and therefore in some cases not clear which places are and are not real).

Have worked through a number of Brett Deveraux's blogs on rice, iron production, and archery, not directly relevant but interesting and some useful take-aways. Especially notable: iron mostly open-mined in the middle ages, not pit-mined; very high forest impacts of iron working; vast differences in arrow utility by range and thus decreased importance of max range/movement in reality (and utility of Parthian shots etc). What mines did C12 GE have & where were they? Real lack of studies as far as I know on that sort of economic hist for the area.