Reviews by jjmhtp
So far, I have only read parts of the guide. As tools, file formats, and related technologies in lexicography and corpus linguistics evolve rapidly, some parts are now outdated, approximately 18 years after its publication.
Furthermore, the strong focus on English—a language that is exceptional in terms of its widespread use and the resources available—is unfortunate if the recommendations are to be adapted to a less-resourced language, which essentially means any other language.
The new edition of the “Artists of the World” database has some improvements compared to the older “Artists of the World Online” edition. Still it is a commercial database locking out most people.
Among the improvements:
- many duplicate entry IDs from ‘‘Nürnberger Künstlerlexikon’’ (Nuremberg Artists’ Encyclopaedia) in the old database seem to throw a HTTP 404 if they are requested in the new one (example old, example new) and can be found under the same ID like the AKL/Thieme-Becker articles in the old one (example)
- new entries for groups (example) with a new ID pattern
- buttons for machine translation of sections “VITA” and “LIFE AND WORK” into English
- definitions for many occupations via tooltip/click
- “Name Variations” sources in literature via tooltip/click
- “Places of Activity” map using OpenStreetMap data
- linked GND IDs for some entries (example), some of them are invalid though (example)
- new fields for some entries:
- “Last edited” (example)
- “Member of” (example)
- “Members” (example; clicking “Coellen, Johann von” from there leading to ID 10167252T1 strangely shows the article text for the family instead of the one for the person as opposed to clicking on ID 10167252T1 directly)
- “Founded”/“Disbanded” (example)
- renamings:
- “Geographical data” → “Places of Activity”
- “Date cited” → more precisely either “Active”: “From”/“Until” or “First mentioned”/“Last mentioned”
- “Place cited” → “First place mentioned”/“Last place mentioned”
- breakdown of “Sources” into “Thieme-Becker, Vollmer, and AKL”, “Other encyclopedias”, “Printed sources” and “Online sources”
- somewhat arbitrary groups of translations of places of birth and death and places cited in the old database are monolingual German in the new one
- removal of redundant occupations? (at least this case: old/new)
- new layout with left-side navigation and two column tabular biographical data
- changed search including instant results, display of date/place of birth/death in results
Some issues with the data:
- Since some point in July 2025 many dates of birth give “1 January” and the year. This was not the case before and pretends wrong precision.
- Many duplicated entries, among them
- many duplicate entry IDs from ‘‘Nürnberger Künstlerlexikon’’ (Nuremberg Artists’ Encyclopaedia) that still have not been merged;
- duplicates that seem to caused by the lack of a standard how to split names into first and last names (examples: 1/2; 1/2);
- those caused by missing data or missing comparison of birth and married names.
- Erroneous markers on the map for locations mostly caused by ambiguous text strings for those locations.
One of the not that many kiosks in Münster. They are always very friendly.
I went to the shop to fix a problem with a device for which Gravis told me I’d have to sent it in for at least 60 euros. I was served immediately, the stuff knew the problem and how to fix it and after 2 minutes I walked out of the shop with my problem solved without any charge. They very very friendly, polite, knowledgeable and helpful!
A nice small place to sit on the street and have a view on St. Lamberti church and people strolling by. The staff is very friendly.
A nice cafe with two outdoor seating areas, one with a view to the cathedral. The staff is very friendly. Unfortunately, the food includes muffins only as a vegan option.
The toilets are at the same level, but probably not accessible by wheelchair because of narrow doors.
In principle also a nice place for working, sockets are scarce though.
Not perfect, but best network I’ve come across until now.
The museum is free and houses quite some nice, informative, sometimes beautiful, sometimes disturbing exhibits illustrating the history of the city and its surroundings since Stone Age. Unfortunately, object labels and other descriptive texts are in German only.
I’ve taken a ride on the Cologne to Hamburg line. In comparison to Deutsche Bahn the ticket was pretty cheap. The service is a bit inferior though I feel. I couldn’t succeed to connect to the wifi apart from a short period of less than a minute though trying on three different devices and two different operating systems.
Unfortunately the schedule on the ticket doesn’t give information on the platform. I could find a bitly short URL redirecting to a Deutsche Bahn page with incomplete platform information. That’s complicated and bad for data privacy.
Public loudspeaker announcements in the train very pretty frequent and partly completely irrelevant admonishing behavior of some individual passengers publicly.
Considering the comparatively affordable price anyway a good option.
A very friendly great place to get good vegan Levantine cuisine in Ehrenfeld. Unfortunately, takeaway packaging isn’t very sustainable, comes with quite some aluminum.