July 5th 2016 meeting
Attending: Loïc Charles, Guillaume Daudin, Béatrice Dedinger, Frederico d’Onofrio, Meng Ying Du, Pierre Hollegien, Pierre Gervais , Paul Girard, Corentin Ponton, Grégory Tible, Quentin Vidal.,
- Ricardo
Following the meeting with Federico and Tena, some changes have been implemented to the datascape: bilateral trade flows and world flows are now separated; the Federico-Tena database has been added in the metadata view where partners can be displayed by color. Moreover, it is now possible to compare the Ricardo’s best-guess with the Federico-Tena’s one in the country view: they largely match except for a period where exports are missing.
The project is to be presented at the digital humanity conference newt week.
- Transcriptions
Hasna achieved her tasks: she completed every import in Marseille, and the ones in Nantes until 1761. Requia has not made such good time: about 10 years of exports in Marseille are still to be retranscribed (1741 and 1742 are very difficult to read and are hard to read, Loic will have to deal with them).
Demba is going to complete Bordeaux and will start transcription for imports or export in Nantes.
- Verifications
Loïc is still checking transcriptions. There are many difficulties: typos (easy to correct), computing errors, wrong unity of measure (more annoying), etc. Trade records were on average better done in big direction than in small ones. Marseille represents a lot of works (about 2500 lines per year – a big day of work is not enough to deal with one year).
Total sums computed by the copyist does not always match with the ones computed by ourselves, but the later are to be preferred because of the excessive rounding or computing errors made by copyists.
- Merchandises
Since 1815, merchandises’ names appear to be much more heterogenous, which increases the work of orthographic normalization and simplification. However, it can be explained by the large number of braces in the products’ labels that are used to distinguish classification and specification.
- SITC
Pierre Gervais is pursuing the classification of the goods, but his facing some difficulties due to the state of the “simplification” file. Most problems wil be tackled by an algorithm that does not integrate every spelling yet.
Beatrice proposes to make a unique and universal classification of products from the 18th century. It sounds like an enormous project for the moment though
New classifications have been added up to the datascape or updated: Medicinal Products by Pierre Hollegien, North American products by Quentin Vidal, Eden Treaty by Corentin Ponton. The grains’s classification made by Federico d’Onofrio is still to be uploaded. “Revised” classifications are now the standard ones.
Bugs of interface are being fixed, especially when selecting parameters for plotting network views.
Guillaude Daudin asked Paul Girard and Gregory Tible on the possibility to implement a new feature in the datascape. It would consist in a tool allowing us to pick terms from a daughter classification and use them in a mother classification. The mother environment would be filtered by the daughter classification.
- Next Meetings
No more TOFLIT meetings before the end of the summer holidays.
Research of a room that could host the 16th September meeting, and discussion about an accommodation in Chicago for October.