Sometimes the intersection of Libraries and Technology has a 10-car pileup

[deborah]

I'm currently trying to normalize and shift into comma separated values files the disambiguated name lists created by four different students who don't work for my department, with whom I'm not allowed to communicate, and for whom I'm not allowed to create standard documentation. (Don't ask.) After title casing everything, my current (incomplete) Vim regular expression is: (screenreader users be warned you should skip!)

:%s#\(<\([^>]*\)>\( \)\)*\(\(\((\)*\([^)]*\)\()\)*\) \([^{]*\)\)#\2,\7,\9,,,,,,,,,\2\3\7 \9;,MS165.001.010.00001


Yes, this is what happens when the people dealing with metadata that need to be normalized are not being managed by professionals.

(I'm doing this in Vim instead of in Perl because each file is a little bit different, so every time I open one I'm doing some hand manipulation of the data and massaging the regular expression slightly to accommodate the fact that each of the students copes with variant names, titles, and unknown personal or surnames differently.)

This is why we can't have nice things.

Comments

[sanguinity]

:: with whom I'm not allowed to communicate, and for whom I'm not allowed to create standard documentation. (Don't ask.) ::

Hahahahahahaha!

And I know the explanation would be total crack for a systems nut like me. But see? I'm being good, and not asking. :-)

[deborah]

It's not even that exciting. It's just weird university politics and the problem that grant funders don't require that you have a project manager. Somehow they believe that a principal investigator can do the job.

(Note: they are very wrong.)

[rantingnerd]

Owww. That hurt my brains. Owwww.

[deborah]

I've maxed out the number of allowable parenthetically saved searches in vim. :-(

[rantingnerd]

D'oh!

That really sounds dreadful.

[rantingnerd]

If I were a LISP-head I'd ask if you had a 10-cdr pileup.

[deborah]

But since you are not, you are still allowed in my house.

[rantingnerd]

I am humbly honored, and very glad. :-)

[libskrat]

*laughing ruefully in recognition*

Did I tell you about the image metadata set with no image titles?

I didn't?

Yeah.

SOME PEOPLE ARE GOING TO THE SPECIAL HELL.

[deborah]

o_O

How do you even do that? What metadata did they give you?

(Actually, we have a huge set of photographs where we are going to be extracting all of the metadata from the EXIF embedded metadata, and instead of titles there are lengthy descriptions of each photo set. But that's different. At least there we can have students synthesize what they see with the lengthy description to extrapolate meaningful brief titles.)

[libskrat]

They gave me a "keywords" field which had (variously) something title-ish that wasn't in any way demarcated from a description of varying length (from zero to...), as well as EVERY FREAKING THING THAT WAS IN THE OTHER FIELDS.

SHOOT. ME. NOW.

[jeshyr]

Let me get this right, you people chose this profession?

Do they hide the details until you graduate and are hired, or were you both on the Really Good Drugs?

Ricky
(who might, under duress, admit that the vim regular expression ... or the fact that other people do stuff like that ... was really hot, in a geeky way)