Technical Support for Canadian Women Writing and Reading from 1950 (CanWWR)

Canadian Women Writing and Reading from 1950 (CanWWR)

From Fall 2010 through Summer 2012, I worked on Dr. Patricia Demers’ Canadian Women Writing and Reading from 1950 (CanWWR). For this project, I provided database management, programming and web development support, in addition to research-based updates to the project’s database.

Most notably, I proposed, developed and implemented a major addition to the site, the Alternate Names Directory. This directory assists users in finding the writers listed in the site who are known under multiple names, as the site’s current infrastructure does not make a direct search function feasible.

Over my time on CanWWR, I:

  • Conducted extensive normalization on the project’s database
  • Developed extensive documentation, including a data entry conventions guide and a technical guide to the development back end
  • Reverse-engineered the site’s PHP infrastructure in order to develop the Alternate Names List addition and to inform documentation I wrote and expanded for future developers
  • Created and populated a new MySQL table in the project database, including cross-linking it to the original tables in preparation for data sharing with the CWRC Project and Orlando Project
  • Wrote additional PHP to query the database, generate content for the Alternate Names List, and connect the page to the main website
  • Contributed a post to the CWRC Blog on CanWWR’s development
  • Miscellaneous minor HTML and CSS updates to the CanWWR website