Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
Some time ago I raised the possibility of readers of the diary adopting pages in the Encyclopedia and becoming editors of them. I made a few changes to the site that made this possible, and a couple of press-ganged “volunteers”, Jeannine and Todd, have so far given this a try.
Being an editor mainly involves writing a summary of a particular topic, with particular emphasis on Pepys’ relationship to it. Another possible task is to tidy up and summarise annotations. So far none of us are sure how much this is possible or desirable — is it feasible to reduce long lists of annotations and use their information and links within a single more coherent summary written by the editor? Although this was my original idea it’s been more difficult than I imagined and it’s something we’ll think about as we progress.
So far we have three pages done as examples:
There is also a page of guidelines and instructions for editors, which should help give you a flavour of what’s involved.
If you’re interested in adopting an Encyclopedia page (and for the moment it’s probably best to choose only one), then have a browse and find a page that says (on the right-hand side) “This page is edited by Phil Gyford”, which is their default state. Email me the name of the page and I’ll create an account for you.
You might want to start by choosing a relatively minor person, place or thing for which there’s only a paragraph or so to say about it. There are lots of these and it would be a good way to get the hang of the process before deciding whether you want to take on more complicated topics.
We’ll probably discuss aspects of policy — such as the issue mentioned above of whether and how to summarise annotations — on the discussion list. If there ends up being a lot of this, and a lot of editors, we may start a new list, but the discussion list should do for the moment.
1 comment | Permalink | Tuesday 2 January 2007 | New features
Sometime this Sunday (21st) I’m going to be doing some major work on the site. I’ll be switching off the ability to add annotations while doing this. The site may well look broken for a little while too. I’ll post a message when everything’s up and running again. I thought it was time for a new lick of paint around here…
3 comments | Permalink | Friday 19 January 2007 | Housekeeping
Although I hoped to make a lot of changes to the site today, I haven’t quite got everything ready. Rather than start now and stay up into the night I’m going to postpone the changes for the time being. Sorry for the false alarm! I’ll try and give some warning when I next have a chance to get this done, sometime in the next week or two.
3 comments | Permalink | Sunday 21 January 2007 | Housekeeping