I returned to Glasgow for a more regular week of working from home, after spending a delightful time at my parents’ house in Yorkshire for the past two weeks. I continued to work on the Comparative Kingship front-ends this week. I fixed a couple of issues with the content management systems, such as ensuring that the option to limit the list of place-names by parish worked for historical parishes and fixing an issue whereby searching by sources was returning zero results. Last week I’d contacted Chris Fleet at NLS Maps to ask whether we might be able to incorporate a couple of maps of Ireland that they host into our resource, and Chris got back to me with a very helpful reply, giving us permission to use the maps and also pointing out some changes to the existing map layers that I could make.
I updated the attribution links on the site, and pointed the OS six-inch map links to the NLS’s hosting on AWS. I also updated these things on the other place-name resources I’ve created too. We had previously been using a modern OS map layer hosted by the NLS, and Chris pointed out that a more up to date version could now be accessed directly from the OS website (see Chris’s blog post here: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/newsroom/blog/comparing-past-present-new-os-maps-api-layers). I followed the instructions and signed up for an OS API key, and it was then a fairly easy process to replace the OS layer with the new one. I did the same with the other place-name resources too, and its looks pretty good. See for example how it looks on a map showing placenames beginning with ‘B’ on the Berwickshire site: https://berwickshire-placenames.glasgow.ac.uk/place-names/?p=results&source=browse&reels_name=B*#13/55.7939/-2.2884/resultsTabs-0/code/tileOS//
With these changes and the Irish historical maps in place I continued to work on the Irish front-end. I added in the parish boundaries for all of the currently required parishes and also added in three-letter acronyms that the researcher Nick Evans had created for each parish. These are needed to identify the parishes on the map, as full parish names would clutter things up too much. I then needed to manually positing each of the acronyms on the map, and to do so I updated the Irish map to print the latitude and longitude of a point to the console whenever a mouse click is made. This made it very easy to grab the coordinates of an ideal location for each acronym.
There were a few issues with the parish boundaries, and Nick wondered whether the boundary shapefiles he was using might work better. I managed to open the parish boundary shapefile in QGIS, converted the boundary data to WGS84 (latitude / longitude) and then extracted the boundaries as a GeoJSON file that I can use with my system. I then replaced the previous parish boundaries with the ones from this dataset, but unfortunately something was not right with the positioning. The northern Irish ones appear to be too far north and east, with the boundary for BNT extending into the sea rather than following the coast and ARM not even including the town of Armoy, as the following screenshot demonstrates:
In QGIS I needed to change the coordinate reference system from TM65 / Irish Grid to WGS84 to give me latitude and longitude values, and I wondered whether this process had caused the error, therefore I loaded the parish data into QGIS again and added an OpenStreetMap base map to it too, and the issue with the positioning is still apparent in the original data, as you can see from the following QGIS screenshot:
I can’t quite tell if the same problem exists with the southern parishes. I’d positioned the acronyms in the middle of the parishes and they mostly still seem to be in the middle, which suggests these boundaries may be ok, although I’m not sure how some could be wrong while others are correct as everything is joined together. After consultation with Nick I reverted to the original boundaries, but kept a copy of the other ones in case we want to reinstate them in future.
Also this week I investigated a strange issue with the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, whereby a quick search for ‘resoler’ brings back an ‘autocomplete’ match, but then finds zero results if you click on it. ‘Resoler’ is a cross-reference entry and works in the ‘browse’ option too. It seemed very strange that the redirect from the ‘browse’ would work, and also that a quick search for ‘resolut’, which is another variant of ‘resoudre’ was also working. It turns out that it’s an issue with the XML for the entry for ‘resoudre’. It lists ‘resolut’ as a variant, but does not include ‘resoler’ as you can see:
<variant gram=”imp.5″>resolvez</variant>
<deviant gram=”imp.5″>resoylez</deviant>
<varref><reference><source siglum=”Alchimie”><loc>380.5</loc></source></reference></varref>
<variant gram=”p.p.”>resolé</variant>
<variant>resolu</variant>
<variant>resolut</variant>
<newvargroup/>
<variant gram=”p.p.pl.”>resolous</variant>
<deviant gram=”p.p.pl.”>resouz</deviant>
<varref><reference><source siglum=”Secr1″><loc>1524</loc></source></reference></varref>
<deviant>resus</deviant>
<varref><reference><source siglum=”Alchimie”><loc>379.1</loc></source></reference></varref>
The search uses the variants / deviants from the XML to figure out which main entry to load from a cross reference. As ‘resoler’ is not present the system doesn’t know what entry ‘resoler’ refers to and therefore displays no results. I pointed this out to the editor, who changed the XML to add in the missing variant, which fixed the issue.
Also this week I responded to some feedback on the Data Management Plan for Kirsteen’s project, which took a little time to compile, and spoke to Jennifer Smith about her upcoming follow-on project for SCOSYA, which begins in September and I’ll be heavily involved with. I also had a chat with Rhona about the ancient DSL server that we should now be able to decommission.
Finally, Gerry Carruthers sent me some further files relating to the International Journal of Scottish Theatre, which he is hoping we will be able to host an archive of at Glasgow. It consisted of a database dump, which I imported into a local database and had a look at it. It mostly consists of tables used to manage some sort of editorial system and doesn’t seem to contain the full text of the articles. Some of the information contained in it may be useful, though – e.g. it stores information about article titles, authors, the issues articles appear in, the original PDF filenames for each article etc.
In addition, the full text of the articles is available as both PDF and HTML in the folder ‘1>articles’. Each article has a numerically numbered folder (e.g. 109) that contains two folders: ‘public’ and ‘submission’. ‘public’ contains the PDF version of the article. ‘submission’ contains two further folders: ‘copyedit’ and ‘layout’. ‘copyedit’ contains an HTML version of the article while ‘layout’ contains a further PDF version. It would be possible to use each HTML version as a basis for a WordPress version of the article. However, some things need to be considered:
Does the HTML version always represent the final published version of the article? The fact that it exists in folders labelled ‘submission’ and ‘copyedit’ and not ‘public’ suggests that the HTML version is likely to be a work in progress version and editorial changes may have been made to the PDF in the ‘public’ folder that are not present in the HTML version. Also, there are sometimes multiple HTML versions of the article. E.g. in the folder ‘1>articles>154>submission>copyedit’ there are two HTML files: ‘164-523-1-CE.htm’ and ‘164-523-2-CE.htm’. These both contain the full text of the article but have different formatting (and may have differences in the content, but I haven’t checked this).
After looking at the source of the HML versions I realised these have been auto-generated from MS Word. Word generates really messy, verbose HTML with lots of unnecessary tags and I therefore wanted to see what would happen if I copied and pasted it into WordPress. My initial experiment was mostly a success, but WordPress treats line breaks in the pasted file as actual line breaks, meaning the text didn’t display as it should. What I needed to do in my text editor was find and replace all line break characters (\r and \n) with spaces. I also had to make sure I only copied the contents within the HTML <body> tag rather than the whole text of the file. After that the process worked quite well.
However, there are other issues with the dataset. For example, article 138 only has Word files rather than HTML or PDF files and article 142 has images in it, and these are broken in the HTML version of the article. Any images in articles will probably have to be manually added in during proofreading. We’ll need to consider whether we’ll have to get someone to manually migrate the data, or whether I can write a script that will handle the bulk of the process.
I had my second vaccination jab on Wednesday this week, which thankfully didn’t hit me as hard as the first one did. I still felt rather groggy for a couple of days, though. Next week I’m on holiday again, this time heaving to the Kintyre peninsula to a cottage with no internet or mobile signal, so I’ll be unreachable until the week after next.
This was my second and final week staying at my parents’ house in Yorkshire, where I’m working a total of four days over the two weeks. This week I had an email conversation with Eleanor Lawson about her STAR project, which will be starting very shortly. We discussed the online presence for the project, which will be split between a new section on the Seeing Speech website and an entirely new website, the project’s data and workflows and my role over the 24 months of the project. I also created a script to batch process some of the Edinburgh registers for the Books and Borrowing project. The page images are double spreads and had been given a number for both the recto and the verso (e.g. 1-2, 3-4), but the student registers only ever use the verso page. I was therefore asked to write a script to renumber all of these (e.g. 1-2 becomes 1, 3-4 becomes 2), which I created and executed on a test version of the site before applying to the live data.
I also continued to make tweaks to the front-ends for the Comparative Kingship project. I fixed a bug with the Elements glossary of the Irish site, which was loading the Scottish version instead. I also contacted Chris Fleet at NLS Maps to enquire about using a couple of their historical Irish maps with the site. I also fixed the ‘to top’ button in the CMSes not working; the buttons now actually scroll the page to the top as they should. I also fixed some issues relating to parish names no longer being unique in the system (e.g. the parish of Gartly is in the system twice due to it changing county at some point). This was causing issues with the browse option as data was being grouped by parish name. Changing the grouping to the parish ID thankfully fixed the issue.
I also had a chat with Ann Fergusson at the DSL about multi-item bibliographical entries in the existing DSL data. These are being split into individual items, and a new ‘sldid’ attribute in the new data will be used to specify which item in the old entry the new entry corresponds to. We agreed that I would figure out a way to ensure that these IDs can be used in the new website once I receive the updated data.
My final task of the week was to investigate a problem with Rob Maslen’s City of Lost Books blog (https://thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk/) when went offline this week and only displayed a ‘database error’. Usually when this happens it’s a problem with the MySQL database and it takes down all of the sites on the server, but this time it was only Rob’s site that was being affected. I tried accessing the WP admin pages and this gave a different error about the database being corrupted. I needed to update the wordpress config file to add the line define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true); and upon reloading the page WordPress attempted to fix the database. After doing so it stated that “The wp_options table is not okay. It is reporting the following error: Table is marked as crashed and last repair failed. WordPress will attempt to repair this table… Failed to repair the wp_options table. Error: Wrong block with wrong total length starting at 10356”. WordPress appeared to regenerate the table, as after this the table existed and was populated with data and the blog went online again and could be logged into. I’ll have to remember this if it happens again in future.
Next week I’ll be back in Glasgow.
I’m down visiting my parents in Yorkshire for the first time in 18 months this week and next, working a total of four days over the two-week period. This week I mainly focussed on the Irish front-end for the Comparative Kingship place-names project, but also adding in some updates to the Scotland system that I recently set up, such as making the Gaelic forms of the classification codes visible and adding options to browse Gaelic forms of place-names and historical forms to the ‘Browse’ facility and ensuring the other place-name and historical form browses only bring back English forms.
The Irish system is mostly identical to the Scottish system, but I did need to make some changes that took a bit of time to implement. As the place-names covered appear to be much more geographically spread out, I’ve allowed the map to be zoomed out further. I’ve also had to remove the modern OS and historical OS map layers as they don’t cover Ireland, so currently there are only three map layers available (the default view, satellite view and satellite view with labels). The Ordnance Survey of Ireland provides access to some historical map layers here: https://geohive.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=9def898f708b47f19a8d8b7088a100c4 but their terms and conditions makes it clear that you can’t use the maps on another online resource. However, there are a couple of Irish maps on the NLS website, the Bartholomew Quarter-Inch 1940 (https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=9&lat=53.10286&lon=-7.34481&layers=13&b=1) and the GSGS One-Inch 1941-3 (https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=9&lat=53.10286&lon=-7.34481&layers=14&b=1) and we could investigate integrating these as the NLS maps people have always been very helpful.
I also updated the map pop-ups to include the new Irish data fields, such as baronies, townlands and the different map types. Both English and Gaelic forms of things like parishes, baronies and classification codes are displayed throughout the site and on the Record page the ITM figures also appear. I updated the ‘Browse’ page so that it features baronies and the element glossary should work, but I haven’t tested it out as there is no data yet. The Advanced search features a selectable list of baronies and currently a simple textbox for townlands. I may change this to an autocomplete (whereby you start typing and townlands that include the letters appear in a selectable list), or I may leave it as it is, meaning multiple townlands can be searched for and wildcard characters can be used.
I managed to locate downloadable files containing parish boundaries for Ireland here: https://www.townlands.ie/page/download/ and have added these to the data for the two parishes that currently contain data. I haven’t added in any other parish boundaries yet as there are over 200 parishes in our database I don’t want to have to manually add in the boundaries for all of these if it won’t be necessary. Also, on the Scotland maps the three-letter acronym appears in the middle of each parish in order to identify it, but the Irish parishes don’t have TLAs so currently don’t have any labels. The full text of the parish will clutter up the map too much if I use it, so I’m not sure what we could do to label the parishes.
Also this week I responded to some feedback about the Data Management Plan for Kirsteen McCue’s proposal and created a slightly revised version. I also had an email conversation with Eleanor Lawson about her new speech project and how the web presence for the project may function. Finally, I made some tweaks to the Dictionary of the Scots Language, updating the layout of the ‘Contact’ page and updating the bibliography page on the new website so that URLs that use the old style IDs will continue to work. I also had a chat with Rhona Alcorn about some new search options that we are going to add in to the new site before it goes live, although probably not until the autumn.
After a lovely week’s holiday in the East Neuk of Fife last week I returned to full week of work. I spent Monday catching up with emails and making some updates to two project websites. Firstly, for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary I updated the Textbase to add in the additional PDF texts. As these are not part of the main Textbase I created a separate page that listed and linked to them, and added a reference to the page to the introductory paragraph of the main Textbase page. Secondly, I made some further updates to the content management system for the Books and Borrowing project. There was a bug in the ‘clear borrower’ feature that resulted in the normalised occupation fields not getting clears. This meant that unless a researcher noticed and manually removed the selected occupations it would be very easy to end up with occupations assigned to the wrong borrower. I implemented a fix for this bug, so all is well now. I had also been alerted to an issue with the library’s ‘books’ tab. When limiting the listed books to only those mentioned in a specific register the list of associated borrowing records that appears in a popup was not limiting the records to those in the specified register. I fixed this as well, and also made a comparable fix to the ‘borrowers’ tab as well.
During the week I also had an email conversation with Kirsteen McCue about her ‘Singing the Nation’ AHRC proposal, and made a new version of the Data Management Plan for her. I also investigated some anomalies with the stats for the Dictionary of the Scots Language website for Rhona Alcon. Usage figures were down compared to last year, but it looks like last year may have been a blip caused by Covid, as figures for this year match up pretty well with the figures for years before the dreaded 2020.
On Wednesday I was alerted to an issue with the Historical Thesaurus website, which appeared to be completely inaccessible. Further investigation revealed that other sites on the server were also all down. Rather strangely the Arts IT Support team could all access the sites without issue, and I realised that if I turned wifi off on my phone and accessed the site via mobile data I could access the site too. I had thought it was an issue with my ISP, but Marc Alexander reported that he used a different ISP and could also not access the sites. Marc pointed me in the direction of two very handy websites that are useful for checking whether websites are online or not. https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com checks the site and lets you know whether it’s working while https://www.uptrends.com/tools/uptime is a little more in-depth and checks whether the site is available from various locations across the globe. I’ll need to remember these in future.
The sites were still inaccessible on Thursday morning and after some Googling I found an answer to someone with a similar issue here: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/104092/why-is-my-site-showing-as-being-down-for-some-places-and-not-others I asked Arts IT Support to check with central IT Services to see whether any DNS settings had been changed recently or if they know what might be causing the issue, as it turned out to be a more widespread issue than I had thought, and was affecting sites on different servers too. A quick check of the sites linked to from this site showed that around 20 websites were inaccessible.
Thankfully by Thursday lunchtime the sites had begun to be accessible again, although not for everyone. I could access them, but Marc Alexander still couldn’t. By Friday morning all of the sites were fully accessible again from locations around the globe, and Arts IT Support got back to me with a cause for the issue. Apparently there was some server in the Boyd Orr that controls DNS records for the University and it had gone wrong and sent out garbled instructions to other DNS servers around the world, which knocked out access to our sites, even though the sites themselves were all working perfectly.
I spent the rest of the week working on the front-end for the Scotland data for the Comparative Kingship project, a task that I’d begun before I went away on my holiday. I managed to complete an initial version of the Scotland front-end, which involved taking the front-end from one of the existing place-names websites (e.g. https://kcb-placenames.glasgow.ac.uk/) and adapting it. I had to make a number of adaptations, such as ensuring that two parallel interfaces and APIs could function on one site (one for Scotland, one for Ireland), updating a lot of the site text, creating a new, improved menu system and updating the maps so that they defaulted to the new area of research. I also needed to add in facilities to search, return data for and display new Gaelic fields, e.g. Gaelic versions of place-names and historical forms. This meant updating the advanced search to add in a new ‘language’ choice option, to enable a user to limit their search to just English or Gaelic place-name forms or historical forms. This in turn meant updating the API to add in this additional option.
An additional complication came when I attempted to grab the parish boundary data, which for previous project I’d successfully exported from Scottish Government’s Spatial Data website (https://www.spatialdata.gov.scot/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/c1d34a5d-28a7-4944-9892-196ca6b3be0c) via a handy API (https://maps.gov.scot/server/rest/services/ScotGov/AgricultureEnvironment/MapServer/1/query). However, the parish boundary data was not getting returned with latitude / longitude pairs marking the parish shape, but instead used esriMeters instead. I found someone else who wanted to covert esriMeters into lat/lng (https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/54534/how-can-i-convert-esrimeters-to-lat-lng) and one of the responses was that with an ArcGIS service (which the above API appears to be) you should be able to set the ‘output spatial reference’, with the code 4326 being used for WGS84, which would give lat/lng values. The API form does indeed have an ‘Output Spatial Reference’ field, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to do anything. I did lots of further Googling and tried countless different ways of entering the code, but nothing changed the output.
Eventually I gave up and tried an alternative approach. The site also provides the parish data as an ESRI Shapefile (https://maps.gov.scot/ATOM/shapefiles/SG_AgriculturalParishes_2016.zip) and I wondered whether I could plug this into a desktop GIS package and use it to migrate the coordinates to lat/lng. I installed the free GIS package QGIS (https://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html) and after opening it went to the ‘Layer’ menu, selected ‘Add Layer’, then ‘Add Vector Layer’ then selected the zip file and pressed ‘add’, at which point all of the parish data loaded in, allowing me to select a parish and view the details for it. What I then needed to do was to find a means of changing the spatial reference and saving a geoJSON file. After much trial and error I discovered that in the ‘Layer’ menu there is a ‘Save as’ option. This allowed me to specify the output format (geoJSON) and change the ‘CRS’, which is the ‘Coordinate Reference System’. In the drop-down list I located ESPG: 4326 / WGS84 and selected it. I then specified a filename (the folder defaults to a Windows System folder and needs to be updated too) and pressed ‘OK’ and after a long wait the geoJSON file was generated, with latitude and longitude values for all parishes. Phew! It was quite a relief to get this working.
With access to a geoJSON file containing parishes with lat/lng pairings I could then find and import the parishes that we needed for the current project, of which there were 28. It took a bit of time to grab all of these, and I then needed to figure out where I wanted the three-letter acronyms for each parish to be displayed, as well, which I worked out using the National Library of Scotland’s parish boundaries map (https://maps.nls.uk/geo/boundaries/), which helpfully displays lat/lng coordinates for your cursor position in the bottom right. With all of the parish boundary data in place the infrastructure for the Scotland front-end is now more or less complete and I await feedback from the project team. I will begin work on the Ireland section next, which will take quite some work as the data fields are quite different. I’m only going to be working a total of four days over the next two weeks (probably as half-days) so my reports for the next couple of weeks are likely to be a little shorter!