User:SaulAlbert

Hello, I'm Saul. I am one of Paul ten Have's bibliography elves, and a computer science / engineering PhD student at Queen Mary University.

I made this wiki. If you have any questions, ask me on this page, or you can always find me at http://saulalbert.net

Scratchpad

This is my scratchpad for ideas and issues relating to emcawiki.net - if it gets big and unwieldy I'll move it somewhere else but for now it's just a dumping ground for random wiki ideas and other stuff.

Ideas and issues

Spaces in page titles problem

If we're creating a bibliography entry, using spaces in the page title means the BibTex won't be displayed on the resulting page (although it will be generated as long as the BibTex key does'nt carry the space). A sensible way of dealing with this automatically would be to supress spaces in new entry names, but for the moment I'll just remind people to not use spaces or specia characters in page names or BibTex keys when adding bibtex entries.

Double quotes problem

When adding titles with double quotes, ordinary double quotes are escaped in the BibTex titles, leading to weird CamelCase display (check the history of http://emcawiki.net/Licoppe2010a to see that in action). I'll probably need to make a plugin that replaces title fields with double quotes with a unicodes: U+201C (double open) and U+201D (double close) or html entities “ and ” respectively.

Duplicate entry problem

There is still the risk that someone may add a duplicate entry. This is easily remedied by deleting it once found, and it's really only a temporary problem (once all the lists have been digitized, we'll only be adding new items). Nonetheless, I have added instructions to each of the bibliographies asking people who want to add items to the bibliographies to check against the lists.

Also when new adding papers, the rationalised naming structure of each page AuthorNameYYYY (e.g. Schegloff1992, Schegloff1992a, Schegloff1992b etc.) should make it relatively straight forward to notice if you're adding a duplicate and the system will not allow identically titled pages to be created.

If this becomes a problem further down the line, I'll think about addressing it with a technical solution, but for the moment we haven't had the problem arising yet...

For the moment I've made a shared dropbox folder with copies of Paul's pdfs. People who are doing a lot of digitizing can subscribe to the folder and update the file they're working on. I know this is not ideal, but transferring those PDFS to wiki format is a *lot* of work.

Multiple bibliography problem

There's a related problem: how do we check whether new entries have been added to the right bibliographies? Especially when they appear in multiple bibliographies in the first place. This is a problem for us as much as for other people. I found a reasonable solution to this: a slightly sophisticated Google Search:

For example, Clair-Antoine added the introduction to 'Embodied Interaction language and body in the material world', the 2011 book by Streeck, Goodwin and LeBaron. I wanted to find out whether this was already in the bibliography, so I searched google for:

 site:www.paultenhave.nl "Embodied Interaction language and body in the material world"

Click here to try it out.

This looks through Paul's site for this title. The results indicated it was in three bibliographies:

• http://www.paultenhave.nl/RIS-bib.pdf - the 'Related Interaction Studies' tag.
• http://www.paultenhave.nl/Bibliography%20Interactional%20Linguistics.pdf - the 'Interactional Linguistics' tag.
• http://www.paultenhave.nl/EMCABIB.pdf - the general 'EMCA' bibliography tag.

So I was able to edit it and make sure it was tagged to appear in all three.

Software fixes todo

• I've discovered that using special characters such as ø or ü in page titles messes with the BibTex export function of the wiki. I should sort that out - or automatically rename pages to standard latin characters when they are bibtex entries.

This is the email I send out to people who offer to help:

Thanks very much for getting in touch. I've created you an account and
you should now be able to add publications to the bibliography.

Feel free to email the admin group if you are having any trouble - it's
always useful to have feedback on the system as it's in development.

You'll find more information on adding items to the bibliographies here:
http://emcawiki.net/Adding_bibliography_entries

And if you check out the bibliography page here:
http://emcawiki.net/EMCA_bibliography_database you'll find a link to all
the current bibliographies we need help with. Just click the
'discussion' tab on top of each bibliography page and you'll see what
needs doing!

Thanks again for offering to contribute, and all the best,

Saul and the EMCA wiki team.