Category Archives: Uncategorized

A 3d model for Day of DH

I went across to the the SE corner of E84th street in NYC and took a whole bunch of pictures of the exterior feature that you can see here. I’m going to upload these into 123DCatch and see how it does. It may not finish until I get off the subway back home so I’ll report then.

This is in my ongoing efforts to use the urban fabric of NYC to simulate the work I’ll be doing at Kenchreai in Greece and Troy in Turkey over the summer. But I figure it will be fun to show how easy it is in this forum. Unless the model doesn’t work…

Bugs are the bane of DH

So I got back to preparing “Ancient Jewish Sciences” for publication. And hit a bug… Apple’s Preview app ignores DPI settings when rasterizing PDFs via the “Export…” item on the File menu. That mattered for me because I have the volume’s one figure as an MS-Word file, which I “printed” to PDF. Then tried to export from Preview. I hit the bug. So I went to install ghostscript with MacPorts. Which revealed that my Xcode installation was off. So I fixed that (eventually). Installed ghostscript. Figured out the right set of options (which seem a little convoluted). Done.

I’d rather blog about the cool workflow that delivers both XHTML and PDF from a single archival but that’s not for today.

Soon I have to review the reading I’ve assigned for this week’s “Roman Pottery” seminar. Topic is “Amphoras”. But that’s got zero to do with DH.

On to the next thing…

 

OK, I’ve finished up a little administrivia and have moved on to something akin to actual DH work. ISAW’s next book coming out is “Ancient Jewish Sciences”, edited by Jonathan Ben-Dov and Seth Sanders. Great book, and I’m eager to publish it. That does mean working on both the XHTML markup and the scripts that turn that into a PDF. I enjoy producing the well-structured markup version and the last step of publishing that is trivial. Producing the PDF, sort of drag, except (and this is important) that it’s a great way to find subtle opportunities for improvement in the XHTML. As in, I render the PDF, I see what went wrong, I fix the XHTML. That’s a good cycle.

Getting going

I signed up for a Day of DH account last night so am just now thinking about how to go about participating. Default option is “Just say what I’m doing at any moment. So here goes…

[And oh yeah, I’m this guy: http://isaw.nyu.edu/people/faculty/sebastian-heath .]

At my desk, which is a fairly messy one. One of the things I do at ISAW is edit our born digital books. Here’s one: http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/hatke2013-aksum-and-nubia/ .But they tend to be simultaneously “born print” and those need to be distributed by snail mail. NYU Press handles the commercial aspects but sometimes I need to put one in an envelope and send it out. This has nothing to do with DH, except by way of illustrating that we exist in a time of transition.