A feature that I had wanted to add for a long time, is glyph coloring. I have now updated the system for clicking on glyphs to allow for different colors. The display pages now have a “color chooser” in the top right corner. Clicking on this will let you cycle through a set of colors (red, purple, green, blue, and black). The chosen color will then be the clickable color. This makes it possible to hilite various glyphs patterns, similar to the examples on the old rongorongo.org.

For example the “genealogy” on Item G:

Butinov/Knozorov "genealogy" on Item G.

Butinov/Knozorov “genealogy” on Item G.

At the current time it is not possible to save such colorings. But perhaps in the future.

A few more improvements and changes:

  • I have added a total for the number of glyphs found. This is added after all hits have been loaded, which may take a while. It appears at the top of the list.
  • I have added a search capability for sequences of 2 glyphs. Note that this searches for sequences. It doesn’t distinguish whether the glyphs are linked or stacked, or simply adjacent. Also it only searches for glyphs which are immediately adjacent.
  • A link was added to the navigation bar called Corpus which links to the new site.

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I have made a number of improvements to the new pages. The most significant is the addition of a glyph search feature. This feature allows users to enter a Barthel code and view all instances of glyphs with that code, in context. The length of the context can be adjusted as well. The default is 300 (pixels) which usually allows for about 5 or 6 glyphs on each side. This search feature is similar to a feature that was implemented before, but in my testing was always excruciatingly slow. The current implementation should hopefully be quicker. Since the number of glyphs returned can be quite large, I have also added a short navigation menu at the top, which allows jumping to the hits for a given tablet.

The way this feature is now implemented, it is possible to bookmark search results. For instance a search for glyph 306 has the link:
http://kohaumotu.org/Rongorongo_new/views/glyph_search_by_code.php?code=306&type=b&context_width=300.

The Barthel/Fischer comparison pages have also been improved, so that there is less distortion to the Fischer glyphs. Glyph groups should no longer be pulled apart.

This site in its current form has become too hard to manage. So taking advantage of the possibilities offered by more advanced web technologies, I am going to start over.

A first step in this direction is available here.
New site
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It’s been a while.
After the push to finish the svgs and the (preliminary) index, I felt a bit of burn-out. Hopefully I should be able to continue pick up where I left off soon. This post to show that this website is still alive. Above a screen visualization of the Rongorongo corpus as viewed through a database tool called “BaseX“. Hopefully once I learn to use it I can do something more useful with it.

I have now created two glyph indexes for the corpus: one for Barthel, one for Fischer. These indexes display the images for the glyphs. These are big files, because they display essentially the whole corpus in a single file. The Barthel index is 40MB and the Fischer is 70MB. The larger size for Fischer seems to be the result of having scanned and edited Fischer at 150% the size of Barthel.

These indexes are “warts and all.” As will be immediately obvious some glyphs are completely mislabeled.

Glyph index (Barthel)
Glyph index (Fischer)

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This entry is just an easy way to make the currently most relevant pages more accessible, until the overall organization of the website has been improved.

Glyph search (svg, context)

Tablet display pages (svg, full lines)

Tablet display pages (svg, wrapped lines)

The svg pages for items U, V, W, X, and Y have been completed. Also since they have now been added to the XML corpus, the search function now covers the complete corpus.

Some points to note:

  • Since most of these items have only short lines, no line-wrapped pages were made.
  • Item W is not numbered, and not searchable.
  • Item X is problematic, as it is very unclear what the “lines” are. I have somewhat arbitrarily re-arranged the glyphs of lines 3, 5 and 6 onto single lines. This was done so that the glyphs could be included in the corpus, and the search facility. But reference should always be made back to the original scans for this item.
  • There are already many known errors (in particular on items A and I), so some searches return the wrong glyphs. These will have to be corrected.

Item S has been added.

S (Barthel)
S (Barthel), line-breaks
S (Fischer)
S (Fischer), line-breaks

Items Q, R and T have been added.

Q (Barthel)
Q (Barthel), line-breaks
Q (Fischer)
Q (Fischer), line-breaks

R (Barthel)
R (Barthel), line-breaks
R (Fischer)
R (Fischer), line-breaks

T (Barthel)
T (Barthel), line-breaks
T (Fischer)
T (Fischer), line-breaks

Glyph search now includes A-T (except S). The corpus file is 107MB.