People of Medieval Scotland 1093-1371

A database of all known people of Scotland between 1093 and 1314 mentioned in over 8600 contemporary documents. It is also being extended to 1371 to include all those lands, peoples and relationships mentioned in royal charters between 1314 and 1371. Find out more

The Historical Thesaurus of English

The University of Glasgow’s Historical Thesaurus of English is a unique resource charting the development of meaning in the huge and varied vocabulary of English. It consists of almost every recorded word in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, all arranged into detailed hierarchies of meaning. Find out more

TheGlasgowStory

As told by some of Scotland's best writers, and illustrated with thousands of images from the collections of the city's world-famous libraries, museums and universities. From football to fashions, Auchenshuggle to Yoker, you'll find it all here. Find out more

SCOTS: Scottish Corpus Of Texts and Speech

The Scottish Corpora project has created large electronic corpora of written and spoken texts for the languages of Scotland, featuring nearly 4.6 million words of text, with audio recordings to accompany many of the spoken texts. Find out more

Mackintosh Architecture: Context, Making and Meaning

The project provides a richly-illustrated Catalogue of all known architectural projects by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, including over 1200 drawings by Mackintosh and the practice, analytical and contextual essays, a timeline and glossary. Find out more

Curious Travellers

The project explores Romantic-period accounts of journeys into Wales and Scotland with a focus on the writings of the Flintshire naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), whose published Tours of both countries did so much to awaken public interest in the ‘peripheries’ of Britain. Find out more

Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus

The Metaphor Map of English shows the metaphorical links which have been identified between different areas of meaning. These links can be from the Anglo-Saxon period right up to the present day so the map covers 1300 years of the English language. Find out more

Consultation Letters of Dr William Cullen (1710-1790) at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

A publicly accessible, online scholarly edition of one of the most important archives of eighteenth-century medical "consultation letters", containing more than 20,000 digitised pages. Find out more

The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler: A Catalogue Raisonné

The online catalogue includes some 550 oil paintings and over 1700 works on paper dating from ca 1850 to 1903. The evolution of each painting from sketch to final oil is described and illustrated. Find out more

The Berwickshire Place-Name Resource

The resource includes historical research for all Berwickshire place-names on the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 Landranger map, including more than 1,600 place-names and 7,000 historical forms presented via a series of interactive maps. Find out more

Week Beginning 20th February 2017

Posted on27th February 2017Authorbaitken

I spent a couple of days this week getting a new exhibition website set up for Johanna Green. This is for a Chancellor’s Fund application that we submitted quite a while ago, back when Johanna was still working in English Language. Setting up the website was quite a useful refresher course in using jQueryMobile and other associated web technologies as it’s been a while since I created a website from scratch. I decided this time to use a single HTML page for the site and store all page data in a JSON file with the page constructed in JavaScript based on hashes in the URL. It makes page loading a lot quicker as the browser doesn’t have to connect to the server to load a new page – it already has all of the content stored in the client side. It also means I can use some swishy page transitions, but I haven’t implemented any of those for now as I personally find them a bit annoying.

The only aspect of the development that proved to be a bit tricky was ensuring that bookmarked links and links from external sources to specific pages in the site would work. I wanted the hash value to appear in the browser’s address bar so people would be able to bookmark a specific page, or share the link to a specific page with others. By default jQueryMobile hides page navigation hashes if you’re using a ‘one HTML page for all the site’ approach, meaning that no matter what page of a site you’re viewing, the main page is the only thing that appears in the address bar. This makes it impossible to share a link to a specific page in the site, and I guess Google searches would only be able to link to the main page of the site too, which is not really very good. After a bit of experimenting I managed to make the hashes appear in the address bar, and I also wrote a small snippet of code that ensured the correct content was displayed if the page was loaded with a hash present – i.e. from an external link as opposed to the page being loaded by the user clicking on a section navigation link. It’s all working fine, although rather annoyingly, jQueryMobile seems to override my manual setting of the active button class, ‘ui-btn-active’. I add it in and the relevant CSS styling is applied, but then before the JavaScript finishes running jQueryMobile removes the class! It seems like very strange behaviour, but I made a simple work-around – I created my own ‘button active’ class that uses the same styling as ‘ui-btn-active’ and applied this to my active button instead. JQueryMobile thankfully doesn’t remove my own class so the button stays active!

I probably spent the best part of a day on administrative tasks this week, including some relating to my role that I can’t really go into details about here. I also arranged to meet with Bryony Randall next week to discuss her text encoding project, and arranged a time for the Arts Developers to meet, which will be the week after next. I spoke with Gerry McKeever about a proposal he’s putting the finishing touches to and I helped Luca with a WordPress issue he wanted my advice with. I also had a chat with Graeme about a new proposal he’s helping to put together. I read through the materials he sent me and gave him some advice about technical approaches and costings. I also arranged a meeting with Catriona Macdonald next month regarding the People’s Voice project and helped Carole with a spam issue with one of her websites. I also spent about a further half a day on AHRC review duties, and will have to continue with this into next week too.

Other than the above I also spent a little bit of time on the Historical Thesaurus OED data import, ticking off another bunch of rows that Fraser had checked and speaking with Fraser about the next steps. I also launched this week’s Burns ‘song of the week’ (see http://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/o-logan-sweetly-didst-thou-glide/). I had a hospital appointment on Friday morning so unfortunately lost a bit of time because of this. The remainder of my week was spent continuing with the migration of the ‘STARN’ resource to T4. As previously mentioned, it’s a pretty tedious task but it will be great to get it all done. I’m now about half-way through the final section: prose. This is a particularly long section, however, containing as it does a bunch of novels by Sir Walter Scott. It’s still going to be quite a while before I can get all of this finished as I am only doing a few pages here and there between other commitments.