I’m not great at getting myself to do things that I don’t want to do at the end of the day (I must exercise before 8:00 am, for example, or I won’t exercise at all), and so I try to save small treats for the end of the day. In this case I am going to close out by working up a little XLST tutorial.
I have a very diligent RA who, at my request, taught himself various flavours of JavaScript and to populate a Neo4j database in the last two years, all in service of The Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada Project. The project itself is based in TEI & I must say we have got a lot of mileage out of the XML, transforming it into HTML to read on screen, into Gephi’s XML for network visualizations, and cypher to populate the database. I’ve been the XSLT guy on the project this last year, and refused to teach my RA the ropes, expecting that he would have enough to handle with JavaScript, and suspecting that there would be more call for node.js and D3.js than for XSLT when he got out into the workforce. That said, he has started to chafe at the time it takes me to write up transformations, and has even devised some workarounds, so I think it’s time for me to stop being the project’s transformation bottleneck, and get him started with XSLT.
What fun.
Good night Day of DH.