(8. Web interface help)

8. Web interface help (TW)

Instructions for the database web interface.

This is very much in progress!

(subheadings only)

 
1. Introduction

The web interface....

 
2. Login

People involved with the project are issued with a username and password, which gives access to additional information of interest to those involved in the project.

Note: because of the expanded access that will be now provided to the database, we have had to increase security. This means that you can only be logged in to one browser on one computer at a time.

stay logged in: this option will set a 'cookie' for the computer and browser being used, so that the user is not automatically logged out when the browser is closed. The user will stay logged in for three days.

This option should only be used on a private computer.

 
3. Database links and statistics

The main way in to the skaldic database...

 
4. Searching skald names and text titles

The following information can be searched simply through selecting the main links on the web interface:

Skalds and other speakers of verse: when you enter a search string in the box at the top of the skalds view and press [enter] or click on the search icon, the database will search for that string (series of letters) in all the names of skalds and their abbreviations.

Poems and groups of stanzas/verses: the poem/verse group listing can be used to search names and abbreviations of poems in the same way as in the skald list. The search results will include all poems, including non-skaldic ones such as eddic poems and rímur.

Texts (sagas and other prose works): use the search field to search all prose works in the database as above. The search results include non-skaldic prose works, that is, sagas and other works which don’t have skaldic verse.

Mss and inscriptions: searching ms. and inscriptions sigla works the same way as above. The search will match any part of the ms. shelfmark, abbreviated siglum or name. For best results, search for the main number of the ms.

Search strings

The search string treats the following letters as equivalent:

a / á
d / ð
e / é
i / í
o / ó / ǫ / ô
u / ú
y / ý

So ‘an’ will match both ‘Án’ and ‘Angantýr’.

But the database treats the following letters as different from the above and each other:

æ, ö, œ, ø, þ

To assist users with keyboards that don’t have the above letters, buttons are put after the search field with these letters. When you click on the button, the letter will be inserted at the end of the search field.

Two wildcard characters are also available:

_ (underscore) matches a single character in the database;
% (percent) matches any number of characters, or none.

 
5. Help for skalds/poems/verses

This document describes the display of information about skalds, poems and verses (stanzas) in the database web interface.

 
6. Help for texts

This document describes the display of information about ...

 
7. Help for mss

This document describes the display of information about ...

 
A. Regular expression syntax

Use the following codes in regular expression searches.

 
B. Unicode conversion of database

The database was converted to Unicode (UTF-8 encoding) on 24 August 2009. This has caused some changes to the way the database works.

It is recommended that you install a MUFI-compliant Unicode font such as Junicode or Andron Scriptor Web. Assistants on the project should contact Tarrin to obtain the font used for quality control (Adobe Garamond Pro).

Notes:

• Text is very unlikely to have been lost during these changes. If something appears to have disappeared, it is probably because the text is not displaying properly rather than the text having been deleted. In any case, everything has been backed up and can be recovered.
• The database now uses modern Icelandic as the language collation, that is, the system for searching and ordering text. This means that vowels with accents are no longer treated the same as vowels without accents when searching and ordering text. In alphabetical order, for example, 'Auðunn' comes before 'Ámundi'. A search on 'armoðr' no longer matches 'Ármóðr'. You can use the underscore character in searches if you can't produce the correct letter, e.g. '_mundi' matches 'Ámundi'. The search fields and some browsing options (e.g. browsing by first letter) reflect these changes — buttons are now provided to insert the non-English characters. For searching and ordering, æ and œ are equivalent; ø and ö are equivalent; and o and ǫ are equivalent for searching, and in some cases the alphabetic ordering is adjusted so that ǫ is equivalent to ø/ö.
• ReykholtTimes is no longer used as a font internally in the database. You can continue to use ReykholtTimes and documents produced in ReykholtTimes to enter and edit data in the database. The database converts such fields to Unicode for storage, and converts them back again for editing. If you want to enter or edit a verse using Unicode instead of ReykholtTimes, you can do so by setting an option in the preferences form. Some other fields using ReykholtTimes can be entered using alternative forms using Unicode.
• The old quality control (‘print-friendly’) format has been replaced with the format tabled at the meeting in Uppsala. This uses the book font and encoding, and is much closer to the final product than the old QC format, making QC more reliable. If you have any problems with the format, let Tarrin know (but please install the Garamond Pro font first!).
• The character o-hook-acute is not handled consistently. This character is not in the Unicode standard as a simple letter — it can be formed by joining o-hook and a combining acute accent, or o-acute with a combining hook accent; and the MUFI project defines an encoding for this character in the 'Private Use Area', but this does not work with non-MUFI fonts (i.e. almost all pre-installed fonts). O-hook-acute can therefore be displayed correctly, but searches and ordering of information may become unreliable. In most fields it is encoded as ô; in some fields formerly using ReykholtTimes it is encoded as o-hook-macron, and others as a custom character. Until this issue is resolved, this character may cause problems for display. However, the character is stored unambiguously if not consistently and no data will be lost or corrupted. If you need to insert or edit this character, use o-circumflex (ô and Ô) to represent the character for the time being.