PicLens support for Arkyves

I am delighted to report that I have added PicLens support to Arkyves in several places.

This means that we can now browse the contents of whole books or collections, or each search result in a spectacular visual way. Many thanks  to the people at PicLens for making and sharing this fabulous tool.

Making better auto-complete INPUT text fields

The first time you see an AJAXy drop-down auto-complete text input field as a web developer, you just have to make one yourself. It is a compulsion. But then you make it, and it seems clunky. Here is a tip to improve the usability: use the current word your cursor is positioned on to retrieve the list of suggestions from your database, and not the entire text field.

I did this yesterday and am delighted with the results. You can see how it works on the Arkyves welcome page, just type some words in the search box in the top left-hand corner of the page. You will notice how the suggestions are based on what word your cursor is positioned at. Nifty, eh?

Here is the crucial snippet of Javascript to make this happen:

(pasting this code stripped the angle brackets, I really need to figure out a better way of posting code snippets. Grrrr. I will leave this snippet below for now, but please note that you can’t just cut-and-paste it and expect it to work. )

getSpaceChunk = function(textElem) {
var v = textElem.value;
if (v.length s1) {
return v.substr(s1, (s2-s1))
}
var startSpaceFound = 0;
for(var i=0; i= s1) break;
if(v.charAt(i) == ' ') {
startSpaceFound = i+1;
}
}
var lastSpaceFound = v.length;
for(var i=startSpaceFound+1; i<v.length; i++) {
if(v.charAt(i) == ' ') {
lastSpaceFound = i;
break;
}
}
return v.substr(startSpaceFound, (lastSpaceFound-startSpaceFound));
}

If someone has suggestions how this function can be improved, ping me. I don’t claim to be a Javascript guru. And credit where credit is due, I first saw this kind of niftyness on del.icio.us, so they inspired me to fix mine.

Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick

I first heard that phrase from an illustrator that I was collaborating with many moons ago. We had some plans to make a computer game, he was also into motorbikes and told me tall tales. Not really knowing what it meant, I did like the turn of it, and have used the phrase ever since.

But now I know where it comes from, thanks to Arkyves. It is a scene from one of the Greek heroic legends (Homer, Odyssey IX) where Ulysses blinds Polyphemus the Cyclops.

Kind of a bummer if you only have one eye, and it gets poked out.

Image from ‘Emblematum liber’ by Alciatus. For more information have a look at the entry on the excellent emblems site of Glasgow University. (for which I made the thematic browsing 😉

Hiding ICONCLASS codes from users

To users of websites who are not experienced with ICONCLASS, the notations (or ‘codes’) are just confusing.

While it is the best way to do very precise searches in large databases like the Bildindex how do you find the correct code to use?

This post on Livejournal reminded me to say something about the use of ICONCLASS codes in searching.

One way is to do a search on www.iconclass.org/browse and then copy and paste the chosen code into the Bildindex Expert search
web form. This is however unwieldy and error-prone, and usually doesn’t give satisfactory results. For a start, it can be a pain to find the code in the first place. Since late 2006 it has been possible to do full-text searches in English, German, French and Italian on the iconclass.org to find the required code, but this is still not the ideal way to do searches. A further problem is that for example at Bildindex they use/store the codes in ‘German’ format, which means a code like

34B114 walking the dog

needs to be entered in the format

34 b 11 4

to yield useful results.

The better way

It is far better to completely hide the codes from the user, and do the code selection and searching ‘in one go’. This is the approach that we use in Arkyves. If you were looking for dogs in the bible, that is what you type in the query box: ‘dog bible’, or ‘dog mythology’ as a different example. The Arkyves system does some advanced indexing using the ICONCLASS codes to give you the requested results, making full use of the hierarchical nature of the system. So if you had searched for ‘domestic animal bible’ you would have also found the biblical canines.

And if you really wanted to drill-down to do super exact matches, a visual tree browser for the ICONCLASS codes with integrated search results is shown.

Here is a video illustrating these points.