[MapHist] Interview with Ken Jennings re Maphead
This is a MapHist list message (when you hit 'reply' you're replying to the whole list) o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + FYI here¹s an interview from a ³book lovers² web site, Library Thing with Ken Jennings about his map book: http://www.librarything.com/author/jenningsken-1/interview --Helen ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø Helen Glazer, Creative Director George Glazer Gallery http://www.georgeglazer.com Antique Globes, Maps Prints ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ___ MapHist: E-mail discussion group on the history of cartography hosted by the Faculty of Geosciences, University of Utrecht. The statements and opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Utrecht. The University of Utrecht does not take any responsibility for the views of the author. List Information: http://www.maphist.nl Maphist mailing list Maphist@geo.uu.nl http://mailman.geo.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/maphist
Re: [MapHist] Interview with Ken Jennings re Maphead
This is a MapHist list message (when you hit 'reply' you're replying to the whole list) o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + Dear all, I am not sure if someone mentioned this, but about a year ago, a similar book was released: Map Addict:A Tale of Obsession, Fudge the Ordnance Survey, written by Mike Parker. http://www.amazon.com/Map-Addict-Obsession-Ordnance-Survey/dp/0007351577/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8qid=1322067616sr=8-1 Best wishes, Jörn Seemann -- Jörn Seemann *Geógrafo/Geographer (PhD) Professor Adjunto (Associate Professor) Departamento de Geociências Universidade Regional do Cariri Brazil* *Novo e-mail/New e-mail: jornseem...@gmail.com* * “Map me no maps, sir, my head is a map, a map of the whole world.” (Henry Fielding)* On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 10:53 AM, Helen Glazer he...@georgeglazer.comwrote: This is a MapHist list message (when you hit 'reply' you're replying to the whole list) o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + FYI here’s an interview from a “book lovers” web site, Library Thing with Ken Jennings about his map book: http://www.librarything.com/author/jenningsken-1/interview --Helen ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø Helen Glazer, Creative Director George Glazer Gallery http://www.georgeglazer.com Antique Globes, Maps Prints ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ___ MapHist: E-mail discussion group on the history of cartography hosted by the Faculty of Geosciences, University of Utrecht. The statements and opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Utrecht. The University of Utrecht does not take any responsibility for the views of the author. List Information: http://www.maphist.nl Maphist mailing list Maphist@geo.uu.nl http://mailman.geo.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/maphist ** ___ MapHist: E-mail discussion group on the history of cartography hosted by the Faculty of Geosciences, University of Utrecht. The statements and opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Utrecht. The University of Utrecht does not take any responsibility for the views of the author. List Information: http://www.maphist.nl Maphist mailing list Maphist@geo.uu.nl http://mailman.geo.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/maphist
Re: [MapHist] Re: ligatures -- to use or not to use?
This is a MapHist list message (when you hit 'reply' you're replying to the whole list) o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + On 11/21/2011 2:56 PM, Daniel Strebe wrote: With regard to ligatures, the major search engines normalize the search text so that ligatures (and other complications, such as capitalization and diacritical marks) do not interfere with searchability. They also add alternate orthographies into the index for any search term or phrase automatically so as not to be confounded by misspellings, regionalisms, or variants. Good to know. But I wonder how/if this affects search engine rankings? In other words, does the fact that the search engine has to normalize content negatively impact where Google places that content in its keyword index? Even if it does, there are other ways to counter this, so I guess I'm more worried about Google's display of search results. How often does the snippet of text shown by Google etc. on its search results pages display garbage for ligatures? Since I know such garbled displays negatively effect my own behavior, I'm assuming they may have negative effects on the browsing behavior of others, as well. Given thousands (if not millions!) of search results for a query, by the time I get to No. 377, I'm getting blurry-eyed and impatient, and seeing a couple of sentences with pharmacop�i� in them (as Duane saw in his copy of my post) will cause me to skip that entry and push on to No. 378 IMO, a garbled search result sends a subtle message that the website's going to have a lot of garbage content ... or worse, not work properly ... and so I make a snap judgment, which I'll bet is often unfair. (In my experience, it's usually the websites with all the eye candy that never work right. ;-) I even have this feeling about each of my own websites, whenever its customized search tool garbles typographic characters. (FWIW, I use the Open Source KSearch http://www.kscripts.com/ on all of my websites now, except for one -- which I am planning to switch over to KSearch as soon as I complete the website re-design.) In the end, perception still matters, especially when it comes to carefully-crafted online brands The search engines themselves behave very well in my experience. They are not the ones returning garbage characters; those are caused by the original page either not declaring its text encoding properly or by the browser not rendering it properly if it is declared. This latter is not a problem in modern browsers. I'm beginning to wonder ;-) I've recently been encountering whole new problems with this (page declarations of text encoding) relating to authoring programs such as Dreamweaver CS5 (it strips out all of the typographic quotes and some other characters which I insert in my text editor, UltraEdit, when I import/copy text into Dreamweaver). I have yet to solve this problem, and ended up reverting to Dreamweaver CS4 when I ran out of time for further troubleshooting. I did, however, recently receive a good suggestion from a member of the Adobe discussion forum: http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/stupid-quotes which I pass on now for those of you interested in how to fix page declarations. So, it would appear that the developing consensus on this list seems to favor providing both old-style and modernized texts. Thus, Jim Hensinger writes: It occurs to me that the simplest conclusion is to find a way to represent the vocabulary in both modern and old forms. This could be done with parenthetical or bracketed insertions in line with the text, or possibly the alternate form could be placed in the HTML source code in remarks !-- pharmacopœiæ -- or in meta tags. I suppose an alternative might also be to reproduce the complete text in old and new form on separate pages and to link them together. Unfortunately, I'm already using every technique I can think of to layer information, without cluttering up the content, and it doesn't take much before I've run out of options ... because I don't have many to begin with. I already use pop-ups for important notes (which some browsers, like MSIE, and platforms that ignore the hover state of links, like the iPod Touch and iPhone, won't display inline, but only in a cluster at the bottom of the Web page). And I already make heavy use of second window pages with narrow viewing panes, that can be stacked around the active browser window for simultaneous viewing, but these require work-arounds for all those who browse the Web with JavaScript turned off. (And there's a great little utility for this that I use called SmartLink http://foundationphp.com/tools/index.php if any Dreamweaver users out there are interested.) My real issue here is that I am already using these techniques to display other content (more early-modern texts). E.g., for one webessay I'm working on now, I'm reproducing
Re: [MapHist] Re: ligatures -- to use or not to use?
This is a MapHist list message (when you hit 'reply' you're replying to the whole list) o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + Geek Alert: Here's a technical suggestion for something to look into, not sure if this is the answer, but maybe someone else here does, or it's something you could take up on a web design forum -- I wonder if placing a meta tag with character encoding of UTF-8 in the header of your web pages would help. You'd have to find out how it handles ligatures. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 for an explanation, albeit in dense techie-prose, of what it is. You should be able to find a better-written explanation for the layperson, but I don't have time to look around at the moment. Placing the code on each web page is not difficult. A tag that looks like this should be within the head tags, at the top of the page: meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=utf-8 I do know this: it's considered best practices in web design to choose SOME kind of character encoding tag on all of your pages to clue in the browser as to how to render the characters on the page. --Helen ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø Helen Glazer, Creative Director George Glazer Gallery http://www.georgeglazer.com Antique Globes, Maps Prints ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø On 11/23/11 7:40 PM, Deborah Taylor-Pearce d...@she-philosopher.com wrote: This is a MapHist list message (when you hit 'reply' you're replying to the whole list) o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + On 11/21/2011 2:56 PM, Daniel Strebe wrote: With regard to ligatures, the major search engines normalize the search text so that ligatures (and other complications, such as capitalization and diacritical marks) do not interfere with searchability. They also add alternate orthographies into the index for any search term or phrase automatically so as not to be confounded by misspellings, regionalisms, or variants. Good to know. But I wonder how/if this affects search engine rankings? In other words, does the fact that the search engine has to normalize content negatively impact where Google places that content in its keyword index? Etc. ___ MapHist: E-mail discussion group on the history of cartography hosted by the Faculty of Geosciences, University of Utrecht. The statements and opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Utrecht. The University of Utrecht does not take any responsibility for the views of the author. List Information: http://www.maphist.nl Maphist mailing list Maphist@geo.uu.nl http://mailman.geo.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/maphist
Re: [MapHist] Re: ligatures -- to use or not to use?
This is a MapHist list message (when you hit 'reply' you're replying to the whole list) o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + Joel Spolsky has written what I think is a very good explanation of this topic (rules for ensuring proper display of text [including ligatures] on web pages): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html. Joel's write-up is, admittedly, at somewhat greater length than many people on this list are likely to want to deal with. -- Jeremy On 11/23/2011 8:18 PM, Helen Glazer wrote: This is a MapHist list message (when you hit 'reply' you're replying to the whole list) o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + Geek Alert: Here's a technical suggestion for something to look into, not sure if this is the answer, but maybe someone else here does, or it's something you could take up on a web design forum -- I wonder if placing a meta tag with character encoding of UTF-8 in the header of your web pages would help. You'd have to find out how it handles ligatures. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 for an explanation, albeit in dense techie-prose, of what it is. You should be able to find a better-written explanation for the layperson, but I don't have time to look around at the moment. Placing the code on each web page is not difficult. A tag that looks like this should be within thehead tags, at the top of the page: meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=utf-8 I do know this: it's considered best practices in web design to choose SOME kind of character encoding tag on all of your pages to clue in the browser as to how to render the characters on the page. --Helen ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø Helen Glazer, Creative Director George Glazer Gallery http://www.georgeglazer.com Antique Globes, Maps Prints ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø ø On 11/23/11 7:40 PM, Deborah Taylor-Pearced...@she-philosopher.com wrote: This is a MapHist list message (when you hit 'reply' you're replying to the whole list) o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + On 11/21/2011 2:56 PM, Daniel Strebe wrote: With regard to ligatures, the major search engines normalize the search text so that ligatures (and other complications, such as capitalization and diacritical marks) do not interfere with searchability. They also add alternate orthographies into the index for any search term or phrase automatically so as not to be confounded by misspellings, regionalisms, or variants. Good to know. But I wonder how/if this affects search engine rankings? In other words, does the fact that the search engine has to normalize content negatively impact where Google places that content in its keyword index? Etc. ___ MapHist: E-mail discussion group on the history of cartography hosted by the Faculty of Geosciences, University of Utrecht. The statements and opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Utrecht. The University of Utrecht does not take any responsibility for the views of the author. List Information: http://www.maphist.nl Maphist mailing list Maphist@geo.uu.nl http://mailman.geo.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/maphist ___ MapHist: E-mail discussion group on the history of cartography hosted by the Faculty of Geosciences, University of Utrecht. The statements and opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Utrecht. The University of Utrecht does not take any responsibility for the views of the author. List Information: http://www.maphist.nl Maphist mailing list Maphist@geo.uu.nl http://mailman.geo.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/maphist
