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About the open-source Toronto Poetry Map

This is an open source version of the Ruby on Rails application that runs the Toronto Poetry Map developed by the Toronto Public Library for the 2015 National Poetry Month (April). While the appearance, copy and data are somewhat different, it has no less functionality than the released version.

It is provided as-is under the terms of the MIT License for the use of those who may want to experiment with it or develop similar projects.

Alan Harnum, Sandra Gornall and Rachel Tennenhouse were the core development team of the application, with curation by then-poet laureate of Toronto George Elliott Clarke and editorial work by the library's Reader's Services Committee.

Installation Notes for Local Environment (using sqlite3 as DB)

  • prereqs: rails, ruby, bundle, etc - standard rails stack stuff
  • checkout the repo, following commands are from the directory it's checked out
  • bundle install --without production
  • rake db:migrate
  • optional, if you want to load the sample data
    • rake db:data:load
  • rails s to run on localhost:3000
  • localhost:3000/admin to add and edit content

On the Data Model

  • the data model is a relatively simple one and not derived from any existing metadata standard (although it could be mapped to one easily enough)
    • Poets are people who write poems.
    • Poems are written by poets. Create a poet before creating poems authored by them.
      • The excerpt of a poem is a preformatted text field, so enter the poem exactly as it should appear in terms of spacing, punctuation, line breaks, etc
    • Books and Websites are Sources of poems.
      • Books can optionally have a Library Item field added; this is an identifier that (in combination with code in book.rb) that allows the construction of a link to the item in the library catalogue. The implementation in this code is specific to to Toronto Public Library's online catalogue.
    • Locations are locations! Two things in particular to note are:
      • you can specify longitude and latitude manually, but it's probably easier to make use of the automatic geocoding and simply enter a sufficienty disambiguated address that the application can automatically geocode it. We found that adding city/town & province/state was typically good enough, FE: "789 yonge st toronto on"
    • Location excerpts allow you to create location-specific excerpts for a particular poem, rather than using the "default" one

Other Notes

  • there is no authentication or authorization required in this version for the administrative interface; production code should restrict access through means documented at https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin (the Gem used for the administrative interface) or other means.

  • the sample data is a snapshot of the poems and other information entered at around the time of release in April 2015.