Interface 09 and Multi-Version Wiki

We will be presenting a poster at Interface09 at the University of Southampton. There will also be a demo of the multi-version wiki, which I hope will be an iteration further on from that presented at Oulu for Digital Humanities 2008. The new multi-version wiki is simply the old wiki with the new nmerge library added, but that includes support for transpositions, which is kind of important. It is a Jetty 6 based web application that runs inside your browser, and allows you to view and edit MVDs in a variety of intuitive ways.

Digital Variants Portal

Eventually the wiki will be broken up and integrated into the Digital Variants Website I am building. In this form the wiki will be a series of portlets inside a portal. Each portlet conforms to JSR 286 and is implemented in Jetspeed 2. A portal allows the user to configure his or her own interface on the web using the portlet components. It also promotes reuse of the portlets by other parties. We are going for broke with this design: I for one don't believe that deficient or obsolescent technology has any place in designs for the future. If we can build it, we will.

nmerge 1.0 posted

OK, I've posted the first BETA version of nmerge for UNIX/Linux/OSX only. I'll add a Windows installer as soon as I can get around to it. Of course I expect it to go wrong immediately, even though I have tested it thoroughly. But I can only really gather more information by trying it on other files. And it comes currently with no example files.

Some basic installation instructions for the non-GNU afficionados:

1. Download the nmerge-1.0.tar.gz file using the link above
2. Open a terminal window, navigate to the download file and unpack it using tar xzf dir.tar.gz or just double click on it if you have a Mac
3. In the terminal window type cd nmerge-1.0
4. ./configure
5. make
6. sudo make install

You should now have a command "nmerge". If it complains about the Java make sure you have a valid JRE installed. It must be at least version 1.5.0 (1.4.2 is no good). To find out type java -version in the terminal window. Download a more recent JRE from Sun. (You only need the JRE not the JDK unless you also want to develop Java software). If it still doesn't work you have an issue that you should post on Google code.

The first update will contain the source code and documentation. I left it out because of my inexperience with GNU automake.

Balisage Paper Accepted

My Balisage paper about how to create and edit MVD files has been accepted. I have already bought the flight tickets and registered, so I will be going to Montreal on August 11-14. That's the other side of the world for me and I think I must be mad. But this is the only way to properly air the MVD concept and get some reactions from the people most likely to field valid objections. If they clear it, then I think that will vindicate it as far as it can be at this stage. The draft paper is here, although it is rather technical. I will post my simplified slide show when I have it.