Re-using Oracc content for online teaching

As we get ever closer to the new academic year, I’d like to remind you of various ways in which you can re-use the free, open-access cuneiform content on Oracc.org:

1. Basics: Start with http://oracc.org/doc/help/visitingoracc/reusingoracc/index.html for simple ideas that anyone can use without a login: from creating links to lists of texts to embedding whole texts in your own web page. 
2. Next steps: go to http://oracc.org/doc/help/visitingoracc/citingurls/index.html for instructions on linking via key-words and glossary entries if you’re a bit more confident with HTML (again, no login required). 
3. If you have an Oracc login and know how to use it: see my old blog post at https://oracc.blogspot.com/2018/07/creating-proxy-parasite-project.html for guidance on creating your own bespoke “proxy” project if you want to create a whole corpus of texts for your class. For example, an old example of mine, that pulls in material from across many Oracc projects is http://oracc.org/cams/tlab which I built for an undergrad class, “Temple Life in Assyria and Babylonia”, a few years ago. 
4. If you’d like to learn how to make your own “proxy” project but don’t have a login or need a refresher, I’ll be running an interactive online workshop on Thursday 20 August (4pm UK time = 11 am US East Coast, 5pm mainland Europe, 6 pm Iraq, etc). Because I will need to issue Oracc logins in advance, and give proper tutorial support during the session, I have capped attendance at 12 people. Please sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oracc-for-online-teaching-tickets-116639651337 and I’ll be in touch with more details. If there’s enough demand, I’ll run extra sessions.

I hope this is all self-explanatory but if you have any questions or problems, please leave me a comment below.

Creating a proxy (parasite) project

Notes for the Oracc workshop participants at RAI64, Innsbruck, July 2018. Updated for the Oracc for online teaching workshop, August 2020

Setting up

1. I've emailed you your password and userID. Let me know if you haven't got it or if it doesn't work!
2. Get yourself a free FTP programme such as Fugu, Cyberduck or WinSCP. You'll use this a lot to upload stuff to Oracc. Make sure you use SFTP (secure FTP) when you log in to build-oracc.museum.upenn.edu (you can't log in with insecure FTP.)
3. You'll also need to connect to Oracc with a line-command unix terminal, to give commands to Oracc. Read this page for basic instructions on how to find and use one, including how to change your Oracc password.

Basics

4. Creating a list of texts for your corpus
   • On your own computer, make a list of the P-numbers and/or Q-numbers you want in your corpus. Follow these instructions (but ignore the last sentence as I've already done that for you).
   • Save it as a text-only file with the name proxy.lst.
5. Uploading your text-list to Oracc
   • Open your FTP programme and log in to build-oracc.museum.upenn.edu on the SFTP setting. Use your Oracc user ID and password.
   • You'll see a list of folders, most of which begin with 00. Look for 00lib and open it by double-clicking.
   • Drag and drop your proxy.lst file into this folder. You can edit and replace it as many times as you like, but make sure the file name stays the same.
6. Building your corpus
   • Open Terminal or PuTTy and type: ssh [your userID]@build-oracc.museum.upenn.edu. Press return, enter your password, and press return again.
   • The first time you do this you'll get a scary message about security. Typ yes and continue.
   • Now you're in Oracc. Type oracc build clean and press return to build your project from proxy.lst.
   • When the process has finished, see what it looks like at http://build-oracc.museum.upenn.edu/[your user ID].

You can repeat steps 4–6 as many times as you like.

Next steps

7. Organising your corpus into lists
• If you want your texts to appear all together online but want to link to groups of them from your VLE, for instance to set weekly readings, you have two choices.
• Both are described on Oracc here.
8. Organising your corpus into subprojects
• If you're using Oracc for several different classes, or want to keep each week's corpus separate, then you can very simply set up one or more subprojects. Each of them behaves like its own project. 
• See the Oracc website for more information
9. Building your glossary/glossaries
• In the Terminal or PuTTy, type: oracc harvest. Press return. This command "harvests" all the available lemmatisations in your corpus across all ancient languages and the proper nouns. It will also generate a list of glossaries with the number of new entries in each.
• Merge those entries, glossary by glossary, by typing: oracc merge [lang-code], e.g., oracc merge sux or oracc merge akk-x-stdbab or oracc merge qpn and press return.
• If you want, there are more detailed instructions on the Oracc website.
• Follow the instructions under step 4 to build the new glossary entries into the website.

Going further

10. Managing the look and feel of your corpus
11. Creating an XTML portal page/site for your corpus
12. Editing your corpus

Contact me for a further tutorial on any or all of these things — and/or read up on the Oracc website.
Also contact me if any of this is wrong or confusing please!

RAI64 workshop resources

This post links to the online resources used in Eleanor's part of the Oracc workshop at RAI64 in Innsbruck, 18 July 2018.

1. New Easy Oracc (NEO)
   • Home page in English and Arabic, and search (beta-version!): http://build-oracc.museum.upenn.edu:4300/home
   • Give feedback to our programmers on bugs, ease of use, desired features, etc. : https://github.com/oracc/oracc-search-front-end/issues (you'll need to quickly create a free Github account first)
2. Nammu text-editor
   • The Arabic-enabled version isn't yet ready for beta-release but you can get the current, stable version here: https://github.com/oracc/nammu
   • Tiny test corpus with Arabic translations (NB word order in mixed AR-EN translations is still incorrect): http://build-oracc.museum.upenn.edu/cams/arabic/corpus
   • Oracc keyboards for easy entry of unicode characters used for alphabetic transliteration of cuneiform (Windows and Mac): http://oracc.org/doc/help/visitingoracc/keyboards/
   • Digital Orientalist keyboards for Arabic and Arabic transliteration (Windows and Mac): https://digitalorientalist.com/2017/07/11/improved-keyboard-layout-for-mac/
3. Virtual Oracc projects for teaching
   • Eleanor's teaching corpus for her undergraduate history course Temple Life in Assyria and Babylonia: http://oracc.org/cams/tlab/
   • Email osc @ oracc . org to be assigned a login ID and a project liaison
   • Instructions on making a list of P-numbers to borrow ("proxy") from other projects for your virtual corpus: http://oracc.org/doc/help/managingprojects/configuration/#h_proxies
   • Introduction to re-using Oracc texts online (& in print): http://org/doc/help/visitingoracc/citingurls/
   • More detailed instructions: http://oracc.org/doc/help/portals/projecturls/

Planning for Oracc projects

Are you planning to apply for large-scale funding to work on an Oracc-related project?

If so, please consult the Oracc Steering Committee (OSC) as early as possible in the process (osc@oracc.org). We’ve recently seen some big and exciting project proposals rejected because they didn’t meet the funding body’s technical expectations.

We can help you maximise your chances of funding success by helping you to:

• develop your proposal in line with the latest appropriate methods and theories in digital humanities;
• write a convincing technical plan
• construct a realistic timetable for staff training, data input, and/or data extraction and analysis;
• review whether Oracc has the resources and functionalities that your project needs or needs to be developed further;
• plan and budget for time for a member of the Oracc Steering Committee and/or the RITS programming team at UCL to work on your project;
• develop an appropriate set of outputs, outreach and dissemination strategies.

If you need to work on Oracc without funding, or on a shoe-string budget, as many colleagues do, go ahead and get in touch with us too, at osc@oracc.org. We are fundamentally committed to offering free support and resources to everyone who needs them.

The Oracc Advisory Committee

The Oracc Advisory Committee (OAC) will work with the Oracc Steering Committee (OSC) to broaden the consultative framework within which Oracc planning and implementation takes place.

The OAC’s responsibilities are to work with the OSC on various matters relating to Oracc development, maintenance, use and evangelism. The OAC will develop the agendas for the meetings and advise the OSC on matters of interest and concern, and on the priority of those matters.

The OAC will be constituted as a group of up to 6 members, with 3 joining the group in year one; a further 3 in year 2; and an annual rotation of up to 3 members after that. Initial terms will be for two years, renewable for up to a further two years.

The OAC will meet regularly via Skype and annually in person, with the first face-to-face meeting taking place in Philadelphia on Monday/Tuesday 5-6^th November 2018. Some travel funds may be available to support those attending the face-to-face. In addition, members of the Steering Committee and the Advisory Committee present at the annual Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale will have a “working lunch”, typically on the Wednesday of the meeting.

How to apply

Please send a letter of interest, stating briefly why you would like to join, with a CV (two pages maximum) to the ORACC Steering Committee osc@oracc.org before April 25th 2018. We will get back to you by mid-May.

The new oracc serve command

If you are managing a project please read this.

In the new buildserver/webserver architecture projects work on the build machines and only send stuff to the webserver when they are satisfied it is ready.  Only public projects and subprojects can be sent to the webserver.

While your work is not on the webserver you can still use it on the buildserver, which also functions as its own Oracc website.  There is no need to send projects to the webserver to see how they look--you can do that on the buildserver.

In order to get a project onto the webserver you need to follow several steps:

1) make the project public by setting <public>yes</public> in 00lib/config.xml

2) oracc build

3) ask one of the steerers (Steve, Eleanor, Jamie, Niek) to rebuild the project list

4) oracc serve

5) wait until the next 10-minute mark, and a minute or two after that.  The webserver looks for new data on the tens, so new data won't show up until a few minutes after that

I'm going to remove (3) when I have some time, but probably not for several weeks.

New ATF mode files for Emacs

I have updated the ATF mode files for Emacs to work with the new build servers.

In addition to this, I have added an upgraded dead-key mode written by Niek Veldhuis.

Instructions for how to use this are in the file oracc-init.el but here they are for convenience:

;; If your project is on build-oracc use the first oracc-build definition,
;; otherwise use the second.  Use a semi-colon at the start of the line to
;; comment out the definition you don't need.

(setq oracc-build "build-oracc.museum.upenn.edu")
; (setq oracc-build "oracc.ub.uni-muenchen.de")

;; If you prefer to use the slash (virgule, /) as the dead key for the Oracc
;; Emacs keyboard, use the first definition.  Otherwise use the second to make comma
;; your prefix key--this is more user-friendly if you are using a German keyboard. 
;; Use a semi-colon at the start of the line to comment out the definition you
;; don't need.

(setq oracc-prefix "slash")
; (setq oracc-prefix "comma")

Please note that Niek's former documentation about selecting atf-mode_de.el no longer applies as I have replaced this with the oracc-prefix variable.

For information on getting and installing (in case it has been a long time) see:

 http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/usingemacs/emacssetup/index.html

News for Oracc editors

The Steering Group has five exciting pieces of news to share with Oracc editors, project managers and other content creators.

1. Nammu 1.0.0 Released

I’m delighted to announce the release of Nammu 1.0.0, thanks to the ever-excellent UCL Research Software Development Group team: Raquel Alegre, Stuart Grieve and recently joined Anastasis Georgoulas. You can find it here:

https://github.com/oracc/nammu/releases

The big changes you’ll notice immediately are:

• the ability to change font size, screen colour
• the inability to save files as anything but .atf

As ever, if you notice bugs in Nammu or have feature requests, please report them to Raquel and the team at https://github.com/oracc/nammu/issues/new. We’ll give bug fixes high priority but new features will be on the back burner for now; see (4) below.

2. New Server Set-up

Nammu is also ready for a change to the way Oracc’s servers work.

Until now, when you ran “oracc build”, your project built on a machine at Penn Museum which is also the public web server — you if you messed up the build, you messed up your public website.

The new set-up separates the “build” and “serve” processes onto two different machines. So we’ll all be building projects on one of two machines — http://build-oracc.museum.upenn.edu or for the Munich team — with the “oracc build” command as usual. This will generate a website in the usual way, and you’ll be able to look at it, etc., and share URLs with others, but it won’t be a public machine (not indexed by search engines, we won’t advertise it). So you can experiment a bit more without worrying about breaking things :)

And then, once you’re happy with the way your project website looks on the private build server, there’ll be an extra command, “oracc serve”, which will move everything over to the public web server, http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu.

The new build server address at Penn is already built into Nammu 1.0.0. If you're not one of the Munich team, email your project liaison now for a new password.. If you are one of the Munich team, you'll get instructions from Steve or Jamie in due course.

Windows users may need to update to PuTTy 0.70 (www.putty.org) in order to connect to build-oracc in a terminal session. This isn't necessary when you work in Nammu; perhaps necessary when you work in Emacs and/or use the terminal for oracc commands. Cyberduck for windows (for moving files to the server) has no issues with the new server as far as we know; Filezilla works fine, too.

3. New Editing Forum on Github

There’s now a lot of shared expertise amongst the Oracc editing community. Individuals often have questions that others can answer; so to lessen the burden on us liaisons, and to help you all get answers faster, I’ve set up a new “issues” section on Github at https://github.com/oracc/editing/issues/ which works just like the bug reporting page.

So, in future if you have questions about editing ATF, please post them to Github rather than emailing one of us. We all monitor it, and will respond when we can. If you’d also like to get email alerts about the Editing forum, tell me (Eleanor) your Github account name and I’ll add you as a “collaborator”. It’s really easy to register if you haven’t already.

4. New Website in Development

The current Oracc website is now showing its age. Steve designed it when hardly anyone had smart phones, when there were only a few projects, and when it was still quite challenging to handle bidirectional script.

So now that Nammu has all its core editing functionality, I’ve asked Raquel and the team to bring the Oracc website into the 21st century. No-one’s going to mess with your content; we’re just going to make it look a WHOLE lot nicer, especially on small screens; and easier to find; and allow content-creators to work in Arabic, Farsi, Sorani, etc.

We’re setting up two focus groups to help us get the design right.

One will consist of my final-year History undergrads, some of whom have basic Akkadian, most don’t, so they’re a good proxy for public users.

But we also need a focus group of research users, and I very much hope we can construct that group from some of you and/or your own project team members. Please let me know before WEDNESDAY 11 OCTOBER (when we start work on this) if you’d like to join in. It won’t be time-consuming!

5. Long-term Support for Oracc Development

The work that Raquel and her RSDG team do for Oracc has been funded by UCL for the past three years: variously, by the Social and Historical Sciences Faculty, and/or my own History Department. I’m super-thrilled to say that for the next FOUR YEARS, RSDG’s work for Oracc will be funded by UCL from the overheads of a magnificent new grant.

The Nahrein Network (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/nahrein) fosters the sustainable development of antiquity, cultural heritage and the humanities in Iraq and its neighbours. Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council's Global Challenges Research Fund, it supports interdisciplinary research to enable universities, museums, and community groups in the region to better serve local, post-conflict needs.

A key goal of the Nahrein Network is to reduce Middle Eastern academics’ international isolation. Another is to research locally appropriate ways to train the next generation of academics in ancient Middle Eastern history, cultural heritage, and related fields. A third is to help local audiences make meaning of local heritage, in local languages and local contexts. As you know, in the Middle East, access to traditional print media is often prohibitively expensive or practically challenging in other ways, but almost everyone uses smartphones and other handheld devices, every day. Open-access, reusable online outputs are therefore a natural solution to increasing the accessibility of academic research, pedagogical materials, and resources for interested publics. So of course, that means Oracc.

Together the Network, Oracc, and RSDG have agreed the following programme of essential work, funded as part of UCL’s commitment to the project:

For end users:

• Optimise Oracc’s website for small-screen devices using responsive design;
• Enable bidirectionality on Oracc’s website to support mixed script use;
• Add pedagogically necessary enhancements, such as Arabic-language glossaries and text- or corpus-specific lists of cuneiform signs;
• Write online help pages in Arabic (and maybe also Kurdish dialect(s) and Farsi if time allows).

For content creators:

• Extend Oracc’s bespoke ancient-text editor Nammu to support bidirectionality in modern translations;
• Add glossary-editing functionality to Nammu;
• Write error messages for Nammu in Arabic;
• Check and adapt Oracc’s XHTML schemas and templates for educational ‘portal’ pages to support bidirectionality;
• Write Arabic-language documentation for content creators

As well as various face-to-face activities in Iraq itself (first up: a workshop on digital humanities at the University of Baghdad, in the spring).

This programme of development work isn’t going to take all four years’ worth of funding, so there will be plenty of opportunity to keep up with new needs and expectations once this first tranche of work is completed.

PS The Network is also looking for a postdoc to work on issues around sustainable development, antiquity, heritage and the humanities, deadline 27 October: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/nahrein/updates.

Editing ATF with Nammu

Introducing Nammu, Oracc's new ATF editor

Nammu is Oracc's new, platform-independent editing software for creating transliterations, lemmatisations and translations of cuneiform texts. It is being written for us by Raquel Alegre and Jens Nielsen of UCL's Research Software Development Team.

• Download the current release of Nammu
• Follow these installation instructions

If you are an existing Oracc content-creator and have been editing ATF in Emacs, that's all you need to do. You'll find that Nammu is an intuitive replacement for Emacs, and that you can use all the Oracc keyboard shortcuts as usual.

New to ATF?

If you haven't edited ATF before, you may also want to download:

• our keyboard for cuneiform transliteration
• and/or one or more unicode transliteration fonts

You should also read the online help pages on learning and using Oracc ATF and on lemmatising.

Do contact any one of the Oracc Steering Group (Eleanor, Jamie, Niek, or Steve) if you would like to have your own Oracc project space (which can be public or private, as you like).

Tips and tricks

Nammu now has all its core funcationality – you can edit real texts with it unproblematically -- but it is still under development. If you like you can join the oracc/nammu group on Github to:

• watch for new releases
• see which aspects of Nammu are currently being worked on, and
• most helpfully for us, report bugs and issues.

Here are some ease-of-use features that we're currently working to enhance:

• At the moment there is no line-wrapping, so you have to scroll across for long lines.
• Nor is there any search/replace facility yet — also coming soon, we hope.
• There's no split screen option yet, either, so for the moment I suggest that you create translations in your usual word processor as you lemmatise, then paste them into Nammu for validation when you finish. It works for me!

For more details see here.

More about Nammu

Nammu has some built-in help but you can also:

• watch a video of me using Nammu to edit a tablet from Tell Khaiber
• watch the whole video, in which I introduce Oracc and Tell Khaiber
• read Raquel's slides about the programming and principles behind Nammu
• ask any one of the Oracc Steering Group (Eleanor, Jamie, Niek, or Steve) for further help!

Oracc 3 Released

On behalf of the Oracc Steering Committee--myself, Eleanor Robson, and Niek Veldhuis--I am pleased to announce the appearance of Oracc 3, the most important visible feature of which is a reimplementation of the main browsing interface (the "pager"). The pager has been streamlined and rewritten for improved stability and many more changes have been made under the surface to support Oracc's next moves, including the creation of new dedicated servers, one at the University of Pennsylvania and the other at University College, London.

For help on the new user interface, click on the query icon, or see http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc2/help/visitingoracc/index.html .

To access additional resources from the pager, click on the plus icon.

The documentation has been extensively revised by Eleanor Robson, and the portal implementation has been reworked by Ruth Horry to be responsive to different sized media such as mobile devices. Niek Veldhuis has provided extensive feedback and testing over the last year which has yielded many improvements.

In addition we encourage you to follow Oracc on various social media platforms--just click on the FaceBook, Blogspot and Twitter icons at the foot of the home page, http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu / http://oracc.org .

As usual, please report any bugs to me, stinney@upenn.edu.

Portals on ESP2

For Project Managers with ESP portal sites

All portal sites on Oracc now need to be in the new version of ESP, called ESP2. If you need help in converting your site, please contact your project liaison.

ESP2 differs in several ways from the old version of ESP. We have made these changes primarily to make it easier to use Oracc on small screens such as phones.

Help pages have improved

All Oracc help pages are now written in ESP2 and have been revised and restructured to make them easier to use. But the documentation is for you! So if anything doesn't make sense, let me know, and I will try to improve it.

Some highlights to draw your attention to:

Style guide

Clearer, more comprehensive advice on good practice

Project URLs

How to link to Oracc pages that are outside your own project

Embedded content

How to embed static content (search bar, corpus stats, video, twitter feeds, etc.)

Minor changes to the schema

If you edit your ESP2 site on Emacs (strongly recommended!) you'll need to download and install the new schema as described here to make sure your xml files are valid.

Changes to where files live

ESP2 is now the default website software on Oracc, so the xml files have been moved up to the top level of 00web. Configuration files such as structure.xml are now in 00web/00config. To make uploads and rebuilds easier, images and static downloads such as PDFs and KML files are now store separately, in 00res/images/ and 00res/downloads/ respectively.

In other words, the directory structure is now:

00res/
    downloads/
    images/
00web/
    00config/
  parameters.xml
         referents.xml
         structure.xml
    about/
    home.xml
    etc.

For full information, see the new Oracc help page on ESP folders.

Tabs and image maps have gone

The tabs on the right-hand side of old ESP pages have disappeared. If you want to link to external sites from the left-hand menu, you can use <struct:link> to do so.

Many old ESP sites used image maps, especially on the front page. Image maps do not shrink to fit small screens so we have removed this functionality but the images used in the image maps have been kept. All links must now be text-based.

You should delete the <param:tabs> element and its contents from your 00web/00config/parameters.xml file.

For more hints on this topic see the new Oracc help on Links and Site Parameters.

Headers have gone

We have removed the header above the main title — with links to pages such as Access Keys, Site Map, Text Size, Privacy, Web Standards, Credits & Copyright, etc.

We now recommend that you make these available via the main menu instead.

Edit your 00web/00config/structure.xml to add:

<struct:page file="about.xml" id="about" accesskey="6" type="page">
    <struct:page file="404.xml" id="404" hide-menu-link="yes" type="page"/>
    <struct:page file="accesskeys.xml" id="accesskeys" accesskey="0" type="page"/>
    <struct:page file="cookies.xml" id="cookies" accesskey="7"  type="page"/>
    <struct:page file="accessibility.xml" id="accessibility" type="page"/>
    <struct:page file="sitemap.xml" id="sitemap" accesskey="9"  type="page"/>
   </struct:page>

and remove the old <struct:page> elements for these pages from the file. (They may have different names, e.g., standards.xml, copyright.xml.)

For more information see the new Oracc help on Site Structure and 00web/about/.

Footers need to change

All Oracc sites (and indeed all websites) need to comply with European Union law on notifying users about the site's use of cookies. We therefore strongly recommend that you change the content of your header. To do this, edit your 00web/00config/parameters.xml file so that the <param:footer> element looks like this:

<param:footer>The [NAME] Project at <esp:link
url="http://oracc.org/" hide-print="yes">Oracc.org</esp:link> / 
Content released under a <esp:link
url="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/" 
rel="external" hide-print="yes">CC BY-SA 3.0</esp:link> licence, 2013-14<br/>
<small>Oracc sites use cookies only to collect Google Analytics data. 
Read more <esp:link page="privacy">here</esp:link>; 
see the stats <esp:link url="http://www.seethestats.com/site/oracc.museum.upenn.edu"
rel="external" hide-print="yes">here</esp:link>; opt out <esp:link
url="http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout" rel="external"
hide-print="yes">here</esp:link>.</small></param:footer>

Changing [NAME] to the name of your project.

For more help on parameters.xml see the new Oracc help on Site Parameters.

Some About files need to change

Again, this is about making Oracc's policy on standards, legal compliance, etc., a bit clearer. Download these template files and edit them to suit your project:

• 00web/about.xml
• 00web/about/accessibility.xml
• 00web/about/cookies.xml

Then place them in your project's 00web and 00web/about folder respectively.

appearance.xml has disappeared

You now choose the fonts and colours for both portal and corpus in 00lib/p3colours.txt. For details see the Oracc help page about web colours.

Rebuilding

You can now rebuild the portal and the corpus separately:

• Use the oracc build portal command to rebuild the portal;
• Use the oracc build corpus command to rebuild your corpus if you have one;
• Use the oracc build project command to rebuild both.

If you have added new images or downloads to your site, you should run oracc resources before you run oracc build portal in order to copy the new files to the right place on the webserver.

See the help page on the Oracc command for more information.

The new rebuilding process is documented on the Oracc help page

Project passwords for Oracc 3

If you are the manager of a project, please contact your liaison to obtain a temporary new Oracc password. You will not be able to log into your Oracc project without it. There is no hurry to do this: please wait until you need to use your project account again.

Logging in for the first time

Even if you and your project editors normally access your Oracc project using Emacs or Aquamacs, the first time that each of you logs in after the password change you must use Terminal or PuTTy in order to initialise the secure connection. Instructions are on the Emacs Setup help page.

In addition, depending on your computer's security systems, Terminal or PuTTy may tell you to delete your known_hosts file, and will tell you where to find it. To delete this file it is easiest to use Emacs: type ctrl-x ctrl-f and enter the filename (on Macs it is ~/.ssh/known_hosts). Simply delete the contents of the file, save and close it. Then go back to Terminal/PuTTy and try the log-in again.

Changing the password

On your first successful log-in you should change your temporary password into another strong password. It must be:

• at least eight characters long
• composed of a mix of upper and lower-case letters and/or digits and/or punctuation (i.e., at least 3 of these 4)

When you have decided on a suitable password, type passwd at the Terminal prompt, then follow the instructions. You will be asked to type the temporary password first, then your new one, twice.

In Oracc 3, you do not need to share your project password with your liaison, as they have their own passwords which allow them to work on your project when needed.

Questions?

If you have any problems or questions with the initial log-in, please contact your liaison.

Adding a Twitter feed to your ESP portal

for project managers

If you have a Twitter account, and your Oracc project has an ESP portal site, you can now add a Twitter timeline feed to it by following the instructions here.

You can see an example of it in use in the new Nimrud project portal (still tiny but growing fast).

In other Oracc news:

• The search functionality, which had been broken for a few days, is now up and running again.
• The GKAB portal pages have now moved closer to the CAMS/GKAB corpus; please update your bookmarks.

Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire

Due to circumstances beyond our control, the original funders of the website Knowledge & Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire no longer have access to the server on which it is hosted, which means that we cannot update it and many of the links (especially those to State Archives of Assyria online). We are currently trying to get it taken down with a redirect to the new site. Meanwhile, please update your links and bookmarks from http://knp.prs.heacademy.ac.uk/ to http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/knpp/

Installing EmacsW32 on Windows 7

The Emacs installation documentation at http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/builder/emacs/ now includes instructions for installing EmacsW32 on Windows 7 (shown in bold). Do let us know if there are any leftover problems with it.

Updated documentation

Over the past week or so I've had a jolly time checking that all the Oracc documentation is up-to-date and reflects current practice, and that all the links work. I won't list every tiny change here, but would like to draw your attention to a few points in particular:

All users: Citing Oracc URLs online and in print

Oracc 2 makes systematic use of stable URIs, so that you can be confident that print references and online links will remain valid. That means, though, that some details of the instructions on how to cite Oracc pages and resources have changed.

Mostly for editors and managers: Oracc language codes

If you have already read my overview of how the new lemmatiser works, you'll know that now you always need to specify Akkadian dialects (unless you are producing ATF for CDLI) and that glossary merges must now always specify the language. I've also worked those changes systematically through the documentation.

For editors and project managers: builder documentation

Editors and project managers will also notice that I have rearranged the list of builder documentation. It's still all there as before but now, I hope, in a more logical order.

For project managers: glossary management

I have incorporated the L2 updates into the sections on glossaries in the pages on project management with Unix and project management with Emacs (and written it into the rest of the documentation).

For project managers: The Oracc Command

This page has been reorganised and updated, so that it is easier to find help on the commands you most need for everyday project management work.

And you'll now find a Documentation full text search at the top of every documentation page.

If you notice anything wrong, broken, missing, or just plain confusing, please let me know, either in the comments or by email. The documentation is for you, the users and project creators, so please tell me if (and how) it isn't serving your needs.

ATF on Emacs

(For editors and project managers)

We still need to do a little work on updating Emacs ATF mode for Oracc 2. Until that happens, here is a list of what is and isn't working, and how to work around the latter.

ATF menu

Available when you have a .atf file open.

Check ATF

Lemmatise Buffer

Create Template

ATF Mode help

All working as usual.

Harvest Notices

Count Lemmata

Not working at the moment but neither is essential to the editing process.

Browse ATF docs

Links to a dead page. Go to the Builder Pages instead.

CBD menu

Corpus-based dictionary menu for project managers; vailable when you have a .glo file open.

Check CBD

Lemmer Update

Rebuild

Not working at the moment; you should manage glossaries through Unix instead

Project Maintenance Mode

CBD Mode help

Working as usual

Browse CBD docs

Links to a dead page. Go to the Manager Pages instead.

ORACC menu

For project managers; accessible from the Project Maintenance Mode item on the CBD menu.

Check Project

Merge Glossaries

Not working at the moment; you should manage projects through Unix instead—and note that the merge command now needs to specify the language

Harvest Glossary

Working as usual

Rebuild Project

Working but no longer recommended; use ncr or nor in Unix instead

Please do let me know if you have any problems or questions.

Adding Full Text Search to your Oracc 2 project portal

(FOR ORACC PROJECT MANAGERS)

One of Oracc 2's new functionalities is the Full Text Search across the whole of the site. There is a new documentation page about how to use it.

It is also very easy to enable users to do Full Text Search on your project alone, from one or more portal pages of your project. To do so you will need to edit them with Emacs or an XHTML editor.

• First add this line of code somewhere within the head element of the page, ideally with the other link elements:

  <link rel="stylesheet" type="/css/oraccbase.css"/>

  EDIT: This is now built into the main Oracc stylesheet.

• Then add this code wherever you want it to appear in the body of your web page, replacing [PROJECT] with the name of your project:

  <span class="find-button"><a href="/[PROJECT]/find">Full 
  Text Search</a></span>

  For instance, you might add a link to the online help:

  <p>Do a <span class="find-button"><a href="/cams/find">Full 
  Text Search</a></span> in CAMS 
  <a href="/doc/user/fulltextsearch/">[HELP]</a>.</p>

  EDITED TO ADD:

  If you are working with ESP, use <esp:link url="/[PROJECT]/find">...</esp:link> instead of <a href="/[PROJECT]/find">...</a>. The necessary CSS code is already built into ESP's stylesheet.

  This is displayed in the browser as:

  Do a Full Text Search in CAMS [HELP].

• Finally, don't forget to run oracc web to make it go live online.

Note that this does not replace the existing text, catalogue and glossary search functions, but allows users to search across the whole of your project, including portal pages. That does mean though that it is not very sensitive to the type of data it is searching, and returns rather rough and ready results. In particular, at the moment it privileges glossary entries but Steve is improving the way it returns results all the time.

As always, please let me know if you need assistance.

Analytics for Oracc 2 projects

(For Oracc project managers)

For Oracc 2, we have replaced Piwik as our user analytics software with Google Analytics (GA). There is just one Oracc account to which all project managers have access. You will still be able to see your own project's access data, but also all the other projects' and the whole of Oracc too, which we hope will be useful, for instance when writing grant applications and reports.

If you already have a Google account I have already registered you on Oracc's GA account. If you haven't (or I couldn't find it) I have already emailed you about this. If you think you should be on Oracc's GA account but can't get access and haven't had me email, then please contact me directly.

Go to Google Analytics and sign in with your Google account details to see the Oracc data, which is already being collected. You should find it quite intuitive to use but I know there's a huge amount of stuff in there.

So in particular, to find your own project's data, choose Standard Reporting from the orange bar at the top. Then in the left-hand menu go to Content, then Site Content, then Content Drilldown and look for your project abbreviation.

There's lots more to discover in GA. The inbuilt help (at the bottom of the left-hand menu) is very good and, as always, do ask me for assistance if you need it. (I've been using GA for Knowledge and Power for five years now, so know my way around quite well.)

Blog redesign

Anticipating the launch of Oracc 2, I've redesigned the blog to look more like our new home page. And no, you can't see it yet! But it's coming soon, I promise.

I've also deleted and/or edited some of the old news items that were only of transient use, and started to label the rest. (I'll do the older ones over the next few days.) I hope the labels will help you find what you are looking for, whether you manage, edit or use Oracc projects.

Let me know in the comments or by email what you think of this new look, especially if you're reading on a mobile device. I'd also like to know if there are particular labels you'd find helpful.