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A browser extension to facilitate the reading of Middle English texts.

Home Page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/memd/

License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0

JavaScript 79.66% CSS 12.10% Shell 0.06% Dart 8.17%

browser-extension cultural-heritage language-tool middle-english old-english medieval-languages medieval-manuscripts medieval-studies

middle-english-mouse-dictionary's Introduction

Middle English Mouse Dictionary

The Middle English Mouse Dictionary is a prototype browser extension for Firefox that assists in reading middle english web pages by showing dictionary information about middle english words when they are highlighted or double-clicked. It tracks which words you add to your personal word list for each tab, and displays them in a sidebar, which can be opened from the right-click context menu.

Install the extension here.

Roadmap

At present this is a prototype, written in pure JS to be as simple as possible. In time we intend to:

Add additional dictionaries.
Implement fuzzy matching to combat orthographic complexity
Improve the UI and UX
Adapt for Chrome/Safari and Manifest V3
Move over to a framework if we deem it suitable
Get funding and/or support from institutions

Places you can test this

Try reading Gawain and the Green Knight.
The University of Michigan's Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.
Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Kent's MEMSlib.
Harvard's Geoffery Chaucer Website.
The International John Gower Society's Original Language Editions.

Acknowledgements

Dictionary: an error-corrected digitzation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "A Middle English Vocabulary" dictionary, provided by James K. Tauber of the Digital Tolkien Project.
Dictionary: a digitization of A. L. Mayhew and Walter W. Skeat's "A Concise Dictionary of Middle English From A.D. 1150 To 1580", hosted by GiTenberg.
Logo: the font in the logo is "Old English Gothic Pixel Font", designed by ColorSwitchFan25 and used under the SIL Open Font License (OFL)

middle-english-mouse-dictionary's People

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middle-english-mouse-dictionary's Issues

Move dictionaryEntriesToHTMLtext element attributes to CSS classes in styleshees

Title

What information we put into entries and from where -- contextualisation of entry content & dictionary sources

I need to take a proper look at the entry details and decide on the usefulness of including all the info present, the context etc

parsing semi-regular orthographic patterns

Þ, þ : they the same or not?
ȝ, 3 : some websites use a 3 (三)
"upon" may be e.g. "vpon" consistently
U is often subbed with V e.g. auenturus
soden may be written ysoden; fried/fryd/fryed may be y-fryed/y-fryd (this is dialectical)
odd rules: "each" is written "vch" in some texts, esp. e.g. Gawain
variation scope: e.g. "though" --> though, thou(g(e, thoch, þaiȝ, thauthȝ, yogh(e, ȝauȝ, þurȝ (see this article for more info about how to identify patterns in this)

I will update this issue OP as I note/remember new things.

User word list sidebar content locked to specific tabs

title
opin?

Sidebar functionality suggestions

Button on sidebar words to remove them.
Option to auto-open the sidebar when the user adds a word.
Option to export sidebar content to JSON (this may not be doable given restrictions idk)
If possible, have the sidebar not overlay upon the right-hand of the website, but rather have it inserted at the right edge such that the webpage content is narrowed (again, maybe can't do, idk).
Shortcut for show/hide.

link to external dict resource if user clicks word not in our list

say user clicks a ME word that isn't in our dictionaries
We open a link to an external resource, in a new tab silently in the background.
Not obtrusive, subtly tells users it's not in our dict, but also gives them an alt they can check if they want.

Refactor previous contextMenu. Bad UX.

wordInfoTabButtonContainer sizing issue

In the modal, the wordInfoTabButtonContainer has inconsistent/irregular height, sometimes obscuring the tab text completely.

Let users choose words they add to the right-hand bar

"I think that the right bar that has the user's stored words, we don't automatically add to" -- Alex
Do so with an option in the word popup

Keyboard shortcuts

Primarily for opening and closing the sidebar, don't know if there are others.

We will likely want a way to customise the shortcut(s), probably meaning we get a settings page before this.

Each dictionary has source notes

The numerals in Tolkien's vocabulary are useful but there's a problem: what do they point to? Well this so let's add a note for each subsequence source dictionary we parse.

double-click info popup boundary controls

function createPopup(event, info) {
  let popup = document.createElement('div');
  popup.className = 'singleWordInfoPopup';
  popup.innerHTML = info;

  /// TODO: when near the browser window edge this can create an element that partially spills outside of the DOM
  popup.style.position = 'absolute';
  popup.style.left = (event.clientX + window.scrollX - 100) + 'px';
  popup.style.top = (event.clientY + window.scrollY + 15) + 'px';

  document.body.appendChild(popup);

  document.addEventListener('click', function(event) {
    document.removeEventListener('click', this);
    popup.remove();
  });
}

Add user-selectable themes for the modal, sidebar, and their elements

Allow for users to choose from a default theme and some stylised ones. Also, some general polish/consistency across the sidebar and modal.

dictionary comprehensiveness

If for now we assume Michigan's MED isn't going to provide access any time soon, we currently suffer from an issue of comprehensiveness (and of the usefulness of entry info). Reading Gawain as a difficult example, many words are missing from our resource. Its usefulness is fundamentally limited for as long as this problem is present.

Here are other reputable & comprehensive dictionaries:

We could parse this PDF easily enough(?)
A Middle English dictionary, containing words used by English writers from the twelfth to the fifteenth century by Stratmann, Francis Henry, d. 1884; Bradley, Henry, 1845-1923
https://github.com/GITenberg/A-Concise-Dictionary-of-Middle-EnglishFrom-A.D.-1150-to-1580_10625/tree/master
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011541557 (if we do old English; there are more datasets for OE afaict)

Now for that top one, if the OCR/HOCR available can't do it, I am willing to try my hand at manually plugging entries of it into a JSON (copyright permitting). It's only 700 pages long with around 40 definitions per page so it'd maybe take me 30 or 40 years if I put a movie or two on in the background no biggie

unfortunately the OCR is total ass

Parse reference entries, i.e. _See_ other word

e.g.

 "4345": {
  "variants": ["vithall", "-in"],
  "partOfSpeech": null,
  "entry": "#Vithall#, #-in#, _See_ Withal, -inne."
 },

// in the lookup
 "vithall": ["4345", "4636"],
 "-in": ["4345"],

Store information about pages where words were marked

We want to store the URL of the page where the user finds each word when they add it to their personal persistent word list. You probably want to strip URL params from the URL before you use it.
You likely also want to store the page name, but maybe make a separate record type for these, because there's no point storing redundant information. Maybe also store the favicon if it exists, but optional.