Colonial Despatches

This page details our progress and future plans for development of this resource.

The Colonial Correspondence site version 2.0 is based on a large dataset of transcription files, which contains all of the documents in the collection, marked up in TEI XML (P5). The TEI ODD file and schemas for the site can be found here. Other parts of the site (such as this page) are also encoded in TEI XML. The data is stored in a Subversion version-control repository which is publicly accessible.

The site is rendered using XSLT, and the end result of the build process is a completely static website following the principles of Project Endings. The resulting codebase requires only a Web server to run, so it can be deployed anywhere very easily. Even the search engine is completely static, using our staticSearch codebase.

Every item in the collection (every document, every biography, every map, every place description, etc.) constitutes a single page on the site, with a simple URL. Ancillary components such as biographies or vessel descriptions are also retrievable using AJAX calls so that they can appear as popups within other pages when required.

This static version of the site was written in 2019-2020 and first deployed in 2020; it replaces a much older web application which was based on the eXist XML database.

In a document collection as large as this, it is inevitable that there will be some errors of transcription or interpretation. Earlier documents in the collection tend to have had more attention, partly as a result of the writing of abstracts for them. The process of writing abstracts is continuing, and we continue to fix errors where we find them. However, all correspondence documents are now linked to images of their original pages, so any reader can verify the transcription they're using if necessary. Please let us know about any issues you find.

There are some minor programming issues that need to be fixed in the 2.0 version of the site, and there are some optimizations we would like to make in order to improve the responsiveness of some parts of the site, such as the facsimile browser. However, the bulk of the site rewrite has been completed, and is a substantial improvement over the old version.

Our encoding practices are constantly evolving, of course, but we have a detailed set of guidelines, written and maintained by Kim Shortreed and Gordon Lyall, and encoded by Lily Maase. If you're interested in the fine details of how our project works, please take a look.

Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre