Kinship diagrams in ebooks?
Hello all, here is a post from a regular reader with a question — anyone have any idea if they could help her? If so, please add a comment below:
I currently have The Todas by Rivers in the rounds (but unavailable).
This work includes a large number of large genealogical diagrams (over
70 of them), in a section of fold-out pages at the end of the volume.
I want to include these in the final version, but face a number of
issues.
I don’t want them as illustrations: they are too large to put on my
current scanner (I took photographs, but these are not good enough for
OCR, although a human can read them.
What I need is a solution to include them in some way that makes them
accessible, keeps my efforts of manual constructing them within
reasonable bounds, and makes it easy to maintain them.
I am thinking along the following lines:
- A fairly simple input format to represent genealogical diagrams in
plain text format that can be typed by the proofreaders/formatters.
+ Content of Trunk + Content of First Branch | + Content of Leaf + Content of Second Branch
(Except that they include a few cross-connections that will require
special dealing).
- An easy XML based format to maintain them in my repository, e.g.
< tree>
< node>
< content>Content of Trunk< /content>
< node>
< content>Content of First Branch< /content>
< node>< content>Content of Leaf< /content>< /node>
< /node>
< node>
< content>Content of Second Branch< /content>
< /node>
< /node>
< /tree>
- An automatically generated text and HTML representation to show
on-line. (Which could be replaced in future with things such as
automatically generated inline SVG representations or even
illustrations)
Is there somebody out there with experience in this area? Tools or
other suggestions?
Alex Golub is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He studies mining and petroleum development in Papua New Guinea, as well as American culture in to the online game World of Warcraft. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org
Definitely store them as XML, and get familiar with XSLT (I recommend XSLT Quickly from Manning Publications). Between the two, there isn’t much you can’t do with the data.
As for maintaining the XML, there are desktop XML editors like oXygen, or if you want to go web-based you could use an XML-based CMS like Symphony.
Hope that’s helpful.
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I made a few kinship charts with Excel a couple of years ago for a term paper: https://www.slashtmp.iu.edu/public/download.php?FILE=matbradl/27536xIanmN I don’t think they’re nice enough to put in a publication, though, and they took forever. And I think you probably want to draw actual pedigrees rather than idealized charts, which is a more difficult task. I have tried at different times to figure various programs out but always have gotten frustrated before I got anywhere…
TThere’s a LaTeX package at https://www.tug.org/pracjourn/2006-4/veytsman/ which seems to be the most promising I’ve seen. It has a Perl program that can use data inputted in a spreadsheet. I only fussed with it so much, mostly because I realized I would have to figure out how to change some of the shape and line conventions.
Have you searched PubMed? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/ And there’s http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/linkages/linkages.html also.
I don’t know if these suggestions help, but if you figure out a way to do this that doesn’t require a degree in math and/or computer science please let me know! I’ve done some really simple charts on OmniGraffle but I can’t imagine that doing a big chart/pedigree graphically would be less than a huge labor. But I also get the impression that real world kinship might be unalgorithmiable.
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Hullo, I’m the querent. I was posting the question on behalf of Distributed Proofreaders; we make free ebooks. So it’s not a question of maintaining code on a website; we need the code for an HTML version of the book.
Project Gutenberg will put up an ASCII version, sans illustrations and genealogies, and an HTML version with illos and geneos. Manybooks will then use the HTML version to make Mobipocket, eReader, etc. versions, all of which are just tweaked HTML. The books may well be displayed on small screens (PDA, phone) as well as large, so the display should degrade gracefully.
We’ve been working on a fair number of public domain books of anthropological interest — there are 183 pre-1923 anthro-related books in process right now — but I believe that relatively few have made it through the DP pipeline. Science-fiction books are done in mere weeks, while books like Basil Thomson on the Fijians can take years. I did 90% of the third-round proofreading on that one, months ago, but it’s still waiting for formatting and then post-processing. Everything is done by volunteers, and many volunteers avoid the tough stuff.
I can’t give you a report on how many anthro books we’ve finished, as neither Project Gutenberg nor Manybooks give any result if you search on “anthropology”. You’d have to search by author or title. Search engines for both repositories are ah, deficient.
If you want to come help us make free books, do. The books are of interest to scholars (out-of-print books free! available immediately!) and will be useful, I devoutly hope, to low-income communities all over the world. They can’t afford large dead-tree libraries, but could afford a few dilapidated second-hand Linux boxes and a free library on a CD or DVD.
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If you’re a TeX person there’s the Pedigree package: http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/graphics/pstricks/contrib/pedigree/pst-pdgr/
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Why not use GEDCOM? It’s an old, somewhat awkward format, but it’s designed for genealogies and there are a ton of GEDCOM->HTML converters out there. See http://www.cyndislist.com/gedcom.htm
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Thanks for the comments, guys: I’ve passed them on to Jeroen, who’s actually doing this book. We have a LaTeX team working on math texts, so even if Jeroen isn’t a TeX guru, he can get help at DP.
Jeroen’s comment, after I reposted the first comment here:
All eBooks I’ve made sofar have gone through XML and XSLT, and although I normally generate HTML, for those I was actually planning to use SVG, and then include the SVG as illustrations. So was hoping (maybe in vain, although I didn’t search extremely hard) to find an XML to SVG graph conversion (The kind of XML is immaterial, as the hard transform is from XML to SVG, not from XML variant A to B.
I feel like a fifth wheel at this point. I’ll give Jeroen the URL and hope that he makes it over here, as his markup-fu is clearly stronger than mine.
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