July 11, 2014 -- As
promised, Salesian Sources, available on sdb.org, now has
added value - a personography which allows you to quickly find
details on all the people mentioned in 'Sources'. This is
something that only a digital version of 'Sources' can do, and
because the file remains in its XML format it joins the world
of 'linked data', ensuring that searches on these individuals
more quickly include the 'Salesian Sources'.
There are two ways you can benefit from the 'personography' (a
neologism, to be sure, but at least it tells you what it is).
You may be reading any
part of Salesian Sources online - wherever a name is
mentioned it will be highlighted as a hyperlink (in dark red).
Clicking on that name will take you to a brief 'bio' of the
individual concerned.
On the other hand, if you wished to get an idea of a group of
people in a particular category, then go to either the Quick
Reference or Main Table of Contents, and the final item will
take you to the Personography
list where you can choose from a range of possible
groupings which include (the list below is not extensive):
- close associates of Don Bosco in early times (at the
Oratory)
- early vocations from the Oratory
- boys who attended the Oratory
- boys with whom Don Bosco was in correspondence
- royalty
- noble families
....
At the very least, this gives the reader a sense of the huge
network of contacts Don Bosco had.
Two words of advice:
Be patient - this s now a very large file and has been left as
a single file of some 4 Mb, so it may initially take half a
minute to a minute to open. However, once open, it is easily
and quickly navigated.
Just know that if you are looking at this on the web, you are
really seeing an on-the-fly conversion of the XML original
into HTML (which makes it look like a normal web page).
But the real value of this file lies in the fact that it is,
and remains, an XML file. XML is the language which enables
data to be exchanged and manipulated across all platforms.
Finally, serious digital humanities scholars can produce some
fascinating results from the data, some of which is not made
visible in the on-the-fly conversion. Anyone wishing to work
with the XML file can download both the sources.xml and the
persons_sources.xml files in their 'pure' form as zip files.
People who do so will obviously know what software they can
then use to extract and manipulate the data. But if none of
that interests you, then don't worry about it - the web
version will give you some very good value just the same.
