This site is still in "beta," or under development. We apologize for all the rough edges. Expect it to remain in beta for most of 2019 as we lay a foundation for the website to grow into a powerful research tool.
Our mission with the website and its resources is to create a virtual hub for an academic community that will stimulate and sustain research carried on in a Torrancean vision in accordance with our Mission.
2017-2018
- January 2017 - May 2018: Creation of the Sources bibliography. Comprehensive aim to include all known publications of Thomas F. Torrance, James B. Torrance, and David W. Torrance (more than 1,500 references at present), with the ongoing goal of direct independent verification of each reference. (Development of the Sources bibliography.)
- May 2018 - October 2018: Creation of the research website, deploying the Sources bibliography online in an open architecture to interact with other research tools, including a brand new Studies bibliography, online editions of Elmer Colyer's orientation aids, individual pages for all Participatio articles, and practical Help pages.
- October 2018: Beta launch of the online Sources bibliography and the new research website for public access.
- November 2018: Kerry was available during ETS and AAR/SBL to lead members through several hands-on tutorials for how the website might assist you in common research tasks, and to help you edit your Profile and/or create Profiles for your mentors.
Development Priorities (how the website will emerge from "beta"):
- Text Cleanup for the Sources bibliographies:
- We hope to finish text cleanup in summer 2020. Meanwhile, the various key words are indicated on the record and can be found by a general search, just not in advanced searches using a specific field filters.
- Explanation: When we imported the offline Sources bibliography into the drupal website, italics formatting was lost and various key words fields were not parsed correctly (Publishers, Series, Genre Type, Colyer Categories, etc.). Therefore, text cleanup in the Sources bibliography became our number one priority after website development passed a threshold of minimum functionality. This is our chief occupation now and in 2020. At this point we will remove the "beta" tag from the website.
- How can I tell? If there is no italics then the record has not beeen touched since importing. The Colyer Categories field may contain key words that belong in Genre Type or other fields. Check the status field in the left sidebar. Records not yet cleaned up have no Status at all.
- What difference does it make? At present, incomplete results occur when using the taxonomies or searching specific fields for known key words. For example, Genre Type terms currently are in either an old key words field (now renamed Colyer Categories) or the specific Genre Type field; they have only been moved to the Genre Type field in records that have been cleaned up since import. Therefore, using a Genre taxonomy term or searching specifically within the Genre Type field will miss records containing the Genre term in the old key words field. Similarly, the Colyer Categories and other taxonomy and key words fields will become powerful tools once they are cleaned up as well.
- See the Bib FAQ for status updates on the Sources and Studies bibliographies.
- Data entry for Studies, working backwards from present.
- We concentrated on developing the Sources bibliography and the website generally, and have hardly even begun to enter items retroactively in the Studies bibliography. Only the most recent Studies are entered. We'll begin to catch up over 2020 working backwards in time.
- Add pdfs and media downloads.
- We hope to see the site develop as a digital library, as more content becomes available for distribution. Please let us know if you have relevant resources to offer, or if you own copyright on any items in the Sources or Studies bibliographies and are willing to grant us permission to distribute them openly on this website.
- Enhance information for taxonomies (eg Journals, Publishers, Institutions, Series, etc.). In particular, adding information about journals in the journal taxonomies will be a priority for us in 2020.
Beyond Beta: Further priorities:
- Implement Advanced Search. Create advanced search page to support Boolean searching based on specific fields, including the searches described at http://tftorrance.org/bibTool.
- Build out Profiles, with input from Fellowship members. Building out the Member and Mentor Profiles has not been a priority for us as yet; it is one of our chief goals for collaborative implementation in 2020 with the help of TFT Fellowship members.
- Implement Member customization features such as the ability to add favorites to your individual profile, create and view member annotations, or tag records with member-defined key words, perhaps with word cloud visualization. (Contingent upon Drupal 8 module development.)
- Enhanced text editor language support. (Contingent upon Drupal 8 module development.)
- How might I use the website in teaching? Features we hope to add in 2019-2020 to support course instruction include the following: make tags, fields and mentor profiles directly editable by student members. See the Course Instruction page and the page on the Course Instruction block in the Create Member Profile help section.
While these are our goals for 2020, no timetable for carrying out these priorities can be guaranteed.
Website/Bibliography team: Kerry Magruder, Brent Purkaple and Gary Deddo. Contact us to report broken links, alert us to interesting new publications, or to suggest meaningful improvements to the site that might help us provide better support for the Fellowship's mission: Webmaster contact form.
- 161 views