Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
Vincent Bell writes to point out a discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week that explores attitudes to sex and gender in a period close to Pepys’. Vincent says:
The last ten minutes of the 45 minute program was a pretty intellectual discussion between Andrew Marr and Tim Hitchcock on sex before and after the 1690/1770 period — essentially saying that the framework or world view of what it was to be male and female changed during this period due to a greater understanding / changing view of human anatomy… anyway this last ten minutes refers to Pepys diary briefly and I think perhaps puts Pepys’ ‘petting’ behaviour into perspective.
You can listen to the show on the site, although I haven’t had a chance to hear it myself yet. From Monday onwards you’ll need to follow the link to ‘Previous week’ or ‘5 January 2004’ under ‘Previous Programmes’ on the right hand side of the page to get the relevant show.
Perhaps the Background Info section could do with some pages around these topics? If you think so, I’d love to hear your thoughts for how to divide the field up. Sensible suggestions only please!
1 comment | Permalink | Thursday 8 January 2004 | Pepys in the media
Those of you who have explored the Background Info section will have found the lists of ‘TrackBack’ links for each item; kind of an index that lists when each item has been mentioned in the diary. (See also this for how the lists are generated, and this for an attempt at explaining TrackBack.)
However, it has never been ideal: links were often duplicated; links to diary entries were often in the wrong order; on some pages the list of links was getting unwieldy; and not all relevant diary entries were linked to.
The first problem was due to strangeness with the software that I won’t go into here. While I haven’t fixed the cause, I have written some tools that make it easy to tidy things up so duplicate links shouldn’t be a problem now.
I’ve also changed the format of the links and worked out a way to keep them in order. See, for example, the list for Sir John Lawson or the longer one for Elizabeth Pepys. Hopefully those are a bit easier to take in at a glance (here’s what Elizabeth’s used to look like). The formatting goes a little askew on heavily-linked items, like Sandwich, but I think it’s still an improvement.
That only leaves the problem of missing references to the diary. Early last year I didn’t create as many links as I do now, so many eary references don’t appear. Now I’ve fixed these other problems it’ll be more worthwhile me going back and adding these in (when I have time).
As ever, do let me know if something doesn’t look right for you, or you have any suggestions for further improvements.
(UPDATE: I wrote a little bit more about the technical side here, if you’re interested.)
2 comments | Permalink | Wednesday 14 January 2004 | Housekeeping