Category: Web Tools

Proposed Session for vKWHSS: “Heraldic IT Systems”

I’ve submitted a proposal for a class session at January’s virtual Known World Heraldic and Scribal Symposium covering the information systems built by and for the College of Arms and the SCA heraldic community.

Heraldic IT Systems: A Roadmap for Geeks, and How You Can Get Involved

Decades ago the College of Arms ran on paper letters and reference books, but nowadays websites and databases are critical to our operations. This session will review these essential systems, both official Laurel resources and those run by individual heralds, from the perspective of technology: servers, software, interfaces, and more. We’ll talk about current development plans, the gaps that remain to be addressed in the future, and how new folks with technical skills can find a way to get involved and contribute to the College’s digital future.

(Non-technical folks are welcome to attend, but this session will assume some prior familiarity with the worlds of web development, databases, programming, or server operations.)

I hope this session helps to spread information about the infrastructure our community relies on, and maybe draws in a few new folks who can contribute to maintaining it and building the next generation of tools.

Geographic and Linguistic Indexes of DMNES

I was intrigued by a recent blog post by Anéžka​ Liška​ z Kolína, in which she describes a technique for locating names in the Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources from a particular region of interest.

However, it seemed to me like there ought to be an easier way to quickly find the relevant sources for such an exploration — a quick way to see all of the bibliographic entries related to a given region and language.

As DMNES doesn’t currently provide such an index, I made a simple mirror of the site and whipped up a quick-and-dirty Perl script to look for citations and build an index page:

A Geographic Bibliography of DMNES

Continue reading “Geographic and Linguistic Indexes of DMNES”

Notes from the Heraldic Technology Roundtable

I’m pleased to report that this weekend’s roundtable session on heraldic technology at KWHSS was productive. More than a dozen people gathered for an hour-long conversation, and we talked through most of the items that had been on my draft agenda while sharing a lot of information and turning up a bunch of new ideas that I hadn’t thought of.

I’ve attempted to summarize the conversation below for reference by folks who weren’t able to attend the session in person.

Continue reading “Notes from the Heraldic Technology Roundtable”

Agenda for the Heraldic Technology Roundtable

[Update July 1:] I’ve written up some fairly-detailed notes from this weekend’s discussion.

A couple of months ago I posted a proposal for a panel discussion of SCA heraldic software development, which will take place this weekend at KWHSS 2024 (June 29 at 3:30 PM).

I’ve put together the below agenda to help focus the discussion, although of course we’ll play it by ear during the session depending on who shows up and what folks think are productive topics for conversation

Continue reading “Agenda for the Heraldic Technology Roundtable”

O&A Search for Unregistered OSCAR Submissions

Here’s a nifty trick for the folks who might be running their own O&A server — which is admittedly a very, very small audience.

The OSCAR software can generate a supplementary data file in the same format as oanda.db which contains the names and armory currently in-process on LoIs which have not yet made it to an LoAR.

Continue reading “O&A Search for Unregistered OSCAR Submissions”

A Concordance of Heraldic Terminology

TL;DR: The International Heraldry Phrasebook provides translations of 500 blazon terms between six different languages.

When reviewing documents about medieval and early-modern European armory, it’s quite common to encounter blazons in languages other than English. In some cases, automated translation tools such as Google’s will suffice, but the degree of specialized heraldic jargon sometimes exceeds their grasp, or yields a confusing jumble that doesn’t resemble a workable blazon.

In the middle of the last century, the short book Vocabulaire-Atlas Heraldic, by Gaston Ferdinand Laurent Stalins, attempted to address a similar need by providing a concordance of over 500 terms, showing their equivalents in each of English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch, along with corresponding illustrations.

Continue reading “A Concordance of Heraldic Terminology”

Descriptions for Field Division Directions

Following the 2021 rules change, SENA A5F1b now says that that changing the direction of partition lines is considered a Substantial Change, as is the difference between divided and undivided fields.

As a result, when using the Complex Search form to do conflict checking for fielded armory, we can add a second line for the field that matches anything with a similar direction. Continue reading “Descriptions for Field Division Directions”

JSON Data for the Traceable Art

As part of my effort to facilitate the development of a successor to the current, somewhat jury-rigged system used to publish the Traceable Heraldic Art collection, I’ve been working on exporting the current data in a format that could be imported by someone developing a successor system.

You can now retrieve nearly all of the textual content of the collection via a series of JSON data files which are automatically rebuilt each time the site is updated. Continue reading “JSON Data for the Traceable Art”