Talk:Caesar Gallic War

What should we do about capitalization? Sulpicius has first letter of chapters, but not of sentences. Caesar has every sentence capitalized. I prefer the former, and it conforms with OCT.

Stephen Tzraskoma suggests (August 2011):

• in the new format, keep a discussion feature so errors can be pointed out easily with one click.

• make it clear what is expected of the students. Have a list of vocabulary that will not be glossed. This will keep the vocab. lists manageable. Put rare words in the notes, rather than the lists. That way the lists are 'words to be learned'. But this excludes the super common core vocab. Publish a list of constructions that will normally not be pointed out, unless hard to recognize. Be clear about expectations.

Rick Hamilton via email suggests (May 2011):

• I see three options along with your plain text (section by section): text plus notes, vocabulary, audio-visual. I didn't see much point in a separate grammatical option if it's going to be as limited as your Caesar sample.

• I do think you can do a lot more with visual material, as occasional eye-candy with the text as you did with Sulpicius (sometimes perhaps hyperlinked) and as support for all of your audio sections. But that is also going to be hardest and most-time consuming. (Maybe your archaeology students would be interssted in helping.)

Formatting:

• Book 4, the first three chapters, now has notes pages in a new format, not breaking up the text. This seems better. Questions: the notes are indented, relative to the links to next and previous pages. Is this better? Vocab. lists are not so indented. Should they be? On the vocab. pages, why is "Next List" and "Previous List" capitalized? Doesn't it look better if they are not? (CF 3/8/11)

Another enhancement ideas:

• For the vocabulary pages, cut and paste words from the online Lewis&Short so as to give the correct quantities. See the Horace page for how this looks. (finished)

• Scan more maps and upload to wiki in the proper places

• Scan Sihler's lexicon and upload .pdf

• Improve navigation within the site ('table of contents' on commentary pages that allows you to skip down to a given section) (also finished linking vocabulary lists) Alice, I love your solution to this problem. Nice improvement to the site!

• Add hyperlinks for cross references and places

• summaries of discussions in the scholarly literature on particular passages.

Formatting:

• Bob Cape suggests that the text is too broken up by the notes, that the notes intrude on the reading experience. Maybe make the notes a link, as with the vocabulary and other pages at the head of each chapter? Fixed this for the first three chapters of Book 4, see above (CF, 3/8/11)

• Bob also suggests that the various translations given are not literal enough to be helpful, that they obtrude. If you're going to give translations, make them literal, or don't give any.