09:24 <@Schuyler> mike_: one of the most interesting issues I've found so far 
                  is that of character encoding.
09:25 < mike_> non standard greek?
09:25 <@Schuyler> just character encoding in general.
09:25 < mike_> aren't there public domain fonts?
09:26 <@Schuyler> I mean the actual binary encoding of accented characters and 
                  so on. Unicode is the right way to go, but Unicode handling 
                  isn't mature across all development languages and platforms.
09:26 < mike_> surely digital scholars have already dealt wiht this
09:27 < mike_> if you want, i can connect you right away with people working in 
               this space
09:28 <@Schuyler> well, this is a lark for me really, I actually have stuff I'm 
                  supposed to be working on.
09:28 < mike_> whenever, let me know...
09:28 < pere> Schuyler: I would recommend UTF-8 instead of Unicode, and ISO 
              10646 over Unicode.
09:29 <@Schuyler> I meant Unicode in general. Of course I'm attempting (I think 
                  unsuccessfully) to convert everything to UTF-8.
09:30 <@Schuyler> but dear lord this is slow. I need to find a better way to 
                  make use of pgsql's indexes.
09:33 <@Schuyler> another issue. The name "Petra" is mentioned once by 
                  Thucydides, but the gazetteer found about 15 places with that 
                  name in my area of interest, probably because the name 
                  undoubtedly means something like "rock". Which one was 
                  Thucydides referring to?
09:35 < mike_> in jordan probably
09:35 <@Schuyler> Actually, Jordan's not in my search area.
09:35 < mike_> famous big temple there
09:36 <@Schuyler> I rather foolishly left out Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel 
                  and Palestine.
09:36 <@Schuyler> since I don't think anything important happened there during 
                  the war. But I'm less than halfway through the book, so I 
                  could be totally wrong.
09:36 < mike_> h'mm let me connect you wiht my friend archeologist. do i use 
               the nocat address?
09:36 <@Schuyler> oh here's a good one.
09:37 <@Schuyler> the name "Apollo" is mentioned 15 times, no doubt in 
                  reference to the god, *but* of course the gazetteer finds it.
09:37 < sxpert-carpc> http://www.esitcom.org/gallery/ivar/dscn2232
09:38 <@Schuyler> ha. here's another good one. "polis".
09:39 <@Schuyler> in general I'm concerned about spelling also. "Attica" versus 
                  "Attika". A metaphone index would fix that, but it would also 
                  introduce more false positives.
09:43 <@Schuyler> however, useful things can be done in the mapping phase by 
                  looking at the relative occurrences of things
09:43 <@Schuyler> nevertheless I strongly expect that concerted human 
                  intervention will still be required to clean up the finished 
                  dataset.