Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue

The Digital Catalogue documents, visually and textually, the first ten years of Andy Goldsworthy's ephemeral, outdoor practice. It replicates Goldsworthy's Slide Cabinet Index, and includes previously unpublished material from Goldsworthy's Sketchbook Diaries. Find out more

James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was a major figure in 19th century printmaking and created 490 etchings. Over 9500 impressions of these prints have been located and investigated during the project, which completes a series of catalogues raisonnés of Whistler's oeuvre. Find out more

Bess of Hardwick's Letters

Bess of Hardwick's Letters brings together, for the first time, the remarkable letters written to and from Bess of Hardwick (c.1521/2 or 1527-1608), one of Elizabethan England's most famous figures. 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

Scots Syntax Atlas

The Scots Syntax Atlas presents the results of over 100,000+ acceptability judgments from over 500 speakers on over 250 morphosyntactic phenomena. The Atlas also contains a text-to-sound aligned corpus of spoken data totalling 275 hours and over 3 million words. 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

Books and Borrowing: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers, 1750-1830

Books and Borrowing uncovers and reinterprets the history of reading in Scotland in the period 1750 to 1830 through 144,000 borrowing records across 18 libraries. 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

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

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

Week Beginning 17th April 2023

Posted on24th April 202324th April 2023Authorbaitken

On Monday this week I attended the Books and Borrowing conference in Stirling. I gave a demonstration of the front-end I’ve been developing which I think went pretty well. Everyone seems very pleased with the site and its features.

I also spent a bit of time working for the DSL. I investigated an issue with square brackets in the middle of words which was causing the search to fail. It would appear that Solr will happily ignore square brackets in the data when they are at the beginning or end of a word, but when they’re in the middle the word is then split into two. We decided that in future we will strip square brackets out of the data before it gets ingested into Solr. I also updated the site so that the show/hide quotations and etymology setting is no longer ‘remembered’ by the site when the user navigates between entries. This was added in as a means of enabling users to tailor how they viewed the entries without having to change the view on every entry they looked at, but I can appreciate it might have been a bit confusing for people so it’s now been removed. I also implemented a simple Cookie banner for the site and after consultation with the team this went live.

Also this week I responded to a query from Piotr Wegorowski in English Language and Linguistics about hosting podcasts and had an email chat with Mike Irwin, who started this week as head of IT for the College of Arts. I spent the rest of the week working through the WordPress sites I manage and ensuring they all work via our new external host. This involved fixing a number of issues with content management systems and APIs, updating plugins, creating child themes and installing new security plugins. By the end of the week around 20 websites that had been offline since early February were back online again, including this one!