Modernist Magazines and Digital Humanities

Editing Terms

The website's taxonomy will inevitably grow inconsistent and will therefore need to be edited from time to time. Students tasked with this job can use the following instructions to perform this work.

Editing the taxonomy cosists of changing terms to ensure that the appropriate version is used (i.e. Poem instead of Poems), fixing improperly concatenated terms (i.e. Poetry, War instead of Poetry; War), or deleting terms that do not belong. The taxonomic terms should first be changed or deleted directly in the editing window of a page or story (click on the Edit tab under the title).

If you are charged with "gardening" the website's taxonomy, you will first need to browse through all of the content to edit the tags. To find all the posts, you can:

1. Click on the "Next" or page numbers links (bottom of homepage) to go back through all the content,
2. Use the "Recent posts" link (top right sidebar) to view a list of posts in descending chronological order, or
3. Go to Administer > Content for a full list of posts.

You can then edit a post's tags by clicking on the Edit tab under its title or on the "Edit" link if viewing the Content or Recent posts list. Please be careful not to change or delete any content in the post itself.

Deleting Terms

You will notice that if a term needs to be removed altogether from the system, it will not disappear from the vocabulary indices (see navigation link above header) just by deleting it from all posts it's associated with. That means you have to remove it manually.

For example, to remove the term "Poetry; War" from the Categories vocabulary:

1. Go to Administer > Taxonomy and click on "list terms" in the Categories row.

   
    

2. After clicking through to the terms list, find "Poetry; War" and click on the "edit" link next to it.
   
   
    
3. Once you've clicked on "edit," you can either change the term and save it, if you wish to do that for all items associated with it, or click on the Delete button. You will then be presented with another screen asking you to confirm the deletion.

   
    

The Spreadsheet's Fields

Using the spreadsheet is easy, but it also requires the data to be input in a very particular way.  For best results, follow these instructions exactly:

1. Always add your information to the BOTTOM of the spreadsheet. When other people are editing the spreadsheet simultaneously, you will notice several cells outlined in various colors. Yours will be the medium blue color. DO NOT ever edit the first row containing the fields between braces ({label}, {start:date}, etc.).
    

2. The first field, "{label}" is the text that will be visible directly on the timeline.  It should be the exact title of the item as given in the magazine. If there is no title, give a brief label of 3-6 words.  To make a title appear italicized, type it exactly like this (without the quotation marks): "AuthorName, <i>Item Title</i>"  Don't worry about the fact that it doesn't look italicized in the spreadsheet, and DON'T USE THE SPREADSHEET'S ITALICS FUNCTION!

   Follow MLA conventions for punctuating the item title: poems, essays, reviews, and other small items go between quotation marks; novels, book titles, poems published as independent books, and plays are italicized.

3. The second field, "{start:date}" is mandatory: it is the date of the magazine issue in which the item appears.  Fill this in: yyyy-mm-dd.  You must use 2-digit months (01, 02, 03) and 2-digit days. If the publication is monthly, and no date is given, then enter it as the first day of that month. I.e. an issue of June 1919 would be 1919-06-01.
    
4. The third field, "{end:date}" is optional: If the event happened over a span of time, when did it end?  Again, use yyyy-mm-dd format.
    
5. The fourth field, "{pages}" is where you should put the starting and ending pages of the item.
    
6. The fifth field, "{author}" is where you should put the author's name. If a known pseudonym is given, include the real name, if known, between parentheses; i.e. T.S. Apteryx (T.S. Eliot).
    
7. The sixth field, "{description:single}"  is where you can describe or annotate the item.
    
8. The seventh field, "{image:url}" is where you cut-and-paste the url for a related image that you might want to include.
    
9. The eighth field, "{EventType}" is where you identify the topic or theme of the item: Nationalism, Empire, Gender, Politics, Aesthetics, Art, The City, Youth, etc. Make sure all terms begin with a capital. And make sure you SPELL IT CORRECTLY and DO NOT DUPLICATE a similar tag that's already in the column. I.e. don't write Cities if The City has already been used by someone else. You can add multiple terms in this field, separated by a semicolon: i.e. Aesthetics; Politics.
    
10. The ninth field: "{eventGenre}" is where you identify the literary genre of the item: Poem, Short Story, Essay, Novel, Advertisement, Painting, Drawing, etc. These should be capitalized and singular.
     
11. The tenth field: "{eventMagazine}" is where you should indicate the magazine in which the item appears. The magazine title should be written completely, including articles such as "The": i.e. The New Age, The Blue Review, etc.
     
12. The eleventh field "{studentNames}" is where you put your names, for ease of bookkeeping.
     
13.  After you have entered your information in the spreadsheet, make sure that it is displaying properly on the timeline.

These instructions were adapted from Prof. Brian Croxall.