THL Toolbox > Places & Geography > THL Place Dictionary > THL Place Dictionary Interactive Data Tables Help
THL Place Dictionary Interactive Data Tables Help
Contributor(s): Than Grove, Steven Weinberger
THL-published websites include webpages with data from the place dictionary presented interactive tables. These tables contain specific sets of place dictionary data, such as all the monasteries in the Amdo cultural region, or all the archaeological sites of Zhangzhung in western Tibet, or all the contemporary administrative units in the central Tibet cultural region, or all the historical polities of the Kham cultural region. These tables are interactive: the user can select how to organize and display the data in the table.
Each row in the table represents the record for a feature in the 
THL Place Dictionary. The name of the feature is a link to the Place Dictionary record for that feature. Other names that occur in the row for a feature and which also have Place Dictionary entries are linked to those entries. In addition, there are also links to other resources related to the feature, such as maps, essays, and so forth.
Controls for Displaying the Table
- Number of Features in the Table: at the top of the table, just below the table header that reads “Interactive List of X,” you will find text that reads, for example, “Showing 1 to 25 of 288 sites”; this indicates the total number of features in the table.
- Number of Rows that Display: you can select the number of rows of the table that display on the page. Pull down the “Display” menu and select the number of rows that you want to display (note that one of the options is to display all rows).
- Navigating through the Table: buttons along the top of the table allow you to move to the first page of the table, the last page, the next page, the previous page, or a specific page.
- Filter by Word(s): you can display only the rows that include a word or phrase. Type the word or phrase into the Filter by Word(s) box and the table will automatically update to display only the rows that include the keyword. You can type multiple keywords to further refine the display, and these keywords can come from different columns of the table.
How to Sort and Display Data in the Tables
The default display is alphabetical order according to the data in the first column of the table. You can change this.
- Order Data by a Column: to order the data by a column, click on the header for that column. This will order the data in alphabetical order (A-Z). For example, in the list of monasteries in Amdo, clicking on the header Name (Wylie) will display the data in alphabetical order according to the name in Wylie. Clicking on the County header will display the data in alphabetical order according to the county name.
- Reverse Alphabetical Order: click the header of the column used to sort the table a second time to order the data according to that column in reverse alphabetical order (that is, Z-A).
- Add a Second Sort Criterion: shift-click on the header of a second column to refine the display further. This will take the order the table is in and add to that order a secondary ordering according to the column that you shift-click. For example, if you click the column header to display by the table according to the data in the County column and then shift-click the Affiliation header, it will display the table alphabetically by county, but then in addition it will order the rows that have the same county in alphabetical order by sectarian affiliation. Thus, it will display all rows in Repgong County that have sectarian affiliation Bön before all the rows in Repgong County that have sectarian affiliation Geluk, and all rows with Geluk affiliation before Nyingma, and so forth.
- Order the Columns: you can arrange the columns in any order. Click and hold on a column and drag it where you want it in the table; then release and it will be repositioned there.
- Reset: this resets the table to its default settings, ordered by the first column.
The selections you make to display the table will be remembered by your browser, though when you clear your cookies or make other such changes, you will have to reset these variables.
For information on creating the data files for the interactive data tables, see the section on creating JSON for Data Tables on the Place Dictionary API page.