Purple Rock Editing is no longer a one-person company! Gloria Robinson has joined the Property File team as a subcontractor to Purple Rock Editing. She brings amazing organizational skills and filing experience to the project, which is integral to handling the estimated 100,000 documents in Property File.
Alaska
April 15, 2007Last August, we had the amazing privilege of going on a cruise through Alaska. My favourite part of the cruise was definitely the day we went through the Tracy Arm Fjord. The glaciers were amazing and the icebergs were what the naturalist on board called “Windex blue”. This first picture is of a U-shaped valley.
This looks almost like a cirque glacier – it was definitely at a higher elevation than the ship. It could also be simply a glacier that’s retreating out of the area, but it looks like a cirque-shaped depression in front of it. Any suggestions?
It could be my imagination, but this rock looks like truncated spurs caused by a hanging glacier.
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Posted by Nicole Barlow
Property File
February 24, 2007Purple Rock Editing is not only an editing company, but also specializes in geological document management. The company has recently taken on the project management of Property File, which is a document collection stored and maintained by the BC Geological Survey. The interesting detail about this particular document collection is that the majority of the documents contained within have actually been donated by the private sector. This provides a wide variety of information, spanning back about 150 years.
At this point, Property File has not been scanned, indexed or microfiched. The ambitious goal that the BC Geological Survey has put forth is to scan and index the whole collection (of about 100,000 documents) and make it available – for free – on the Internet. You can monitor the progress of this exciting project at http://www.em.gov.bc.ca/mining/geolsurv/Minfile/propfile.htm.
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Posted by Nicole Barlow
Dilemma
September 4, 2006I was editing a paper a few weeks ago by two authors, and one is deceased. My dilemma arose when, throughout the paper, phrases such as “we studied”, “we used”, and “we read” were used. Because only one author is still living, is this phrase still grammatically accurate?
Footnotes were given for each of the authors as well, and one had an address, phone number, email address, and other contact information, and the other had only “deceased”. This had me pondering subjects of a philosophical nature…
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Posted by Nicole Barlow
Punctuation and other matters of life and death
July 7, 2006I just finished reading the new book called Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss. The cover of the book touts its achievement as “The #1 New York Times Bestseller,” but it still seems weird to me that a book about punctuation would have such a widespread appeal. Our society has shifted to a less “absolute” approach to grammar and punctuation, it seems!
What does this have to do with geology? you might ask. Plenty! Lynne makes some powerful examples of how punctuation can change the entire meaning of a sentence. And spelling and grammar checks won’t catch it because the new meaning is grammatically accurate: it’s just not what you want to say.
Lynne’s book describes the use of a bunch of commonly used (and misused) punctuation marks, and in such a way that’s more memorable than a high school English text.
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Posted by Nicole Barlow
