German, Tuckborough, Prints
Kris Kowal
tuckborough.net encyclopedia and German translations of all place
names, along with several other small improvements. I now have a copy
of the map at half resolution (256 megapixels) on a USB stick and am
figuratively walking to a print shop right now.
Regarding prints, I'm going to run a prototype today. I'm planning to
offer prints of the Map of Middle-earth in Elvish at 1 meter square.
For a print on heavy-coated-do-not-fold-spindle-or-mutilate paper,
it'll cost $100 plus shipping, and for a very high-quality, virtually
indestructible print on vinyl, it will cost $200. I'll let you all
know here when I've set up shop online. I'm planning to offer these
prints through PayPal. The prototype I'm running will be on a white
background; the parchment really makes the page "pop" online, but I
suspect a white backdrop will look better on paper. I plan to sign and
number the prints. The first few purchases will subsidize a free print
for Måns for his invaluable assistance.
With significant assistance from Silvia Ochsenford, Eryniel Elmiris,
we now have German translations for all of the place-names in
Middle-earth. I've integrated these into the "Names of Locations in
Middle-earth" open spreadsheet. I've altered this spreadsheet so it
tracks what language a word comes from independently of what languages
the name is known in. For example, "Gondor" is known by the name
"Gondor" in every language, although the word is Sindarin in origin.
There are a lot of patterns for combinations of languages and
use-names.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0An5phhxDkYDPdG05Qk9oTU1FVlhEWlNqTkMwbjBPUmc&hl=en
I also discovered that it would be relatively straightforward to
incorporate links to articles in "The Thain's Book" on
tuckborough.net, by doing some modest programming.
https://github.com/kriskowal/3rin.gs/blob/master/tuckborough.py
That script is responsible for downloading, scraping, and correlating
information from the encyclopedia and creating about 300 new links.
The data I've gleaned from this will also be useful eventually for
training the search box to be a bit more tolerant, since Tuckborough
indexes the names of locations without diacritics, but includes
diacritics in the titles of the corresponding articles. By
constructing equivalence classes for names based on the URL's the
names refer to, it's possible to discover missing or conflicting
synonyms with my existing data.
I also created a more rigorous system for citations, again with help
on the German side from Silvia. Most citations are now hyperlinks to
where you can get the corresponding books and newsletters.
So, summarily, I have a bunch more data. I rewrote the article
generator using Python's Django template library and the new
spreadsheet schemas, so now we have a fresh set of articles for all of
the locations in Middle-earth, cross-referenced with even more sources
and languages.
Enjoy,
Kris Kowal