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

Seeing speech

The resource provides ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) and lip video of speech, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) video of speech, and 2D midsagittal head animations based on MRI and UTI data. 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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week Beginning 26th June 2023

Posted on4th July 20234th July 2023Authorbaitken

I continued to work on the front-end for the Books and Borrowing project this week, and have now completed the migration of the dev site to Bootstrap. There are still some aspects that I would like to tweak further, but on the whole the layout is now much improved on all screen sizes. On the page that displays a page from a library register I have updated the navbar to make it position better on all screen sizes and I updated the image section so that it now now has a dark grey background. Text and image panels now work better on all screen sizes and ‘Image view’ now has a larger image viewer.

On the library books page I’ve improved that layout of the ‘change the view’ feature and when viewing books grouped by authors the author now has a blue background to help spot where the divisions between authors are. Layout of ‘top 100’ icon and the ESTC listing have also been improved:

I also updated the borrowers so these are now listed in a grid with four per row to make better use of the available space:

In the library ‘Facts’ page the ‘summary’ section now has a narrative flow rather than a bullet point list of figures. The ‘top 10’ lists now appear in columns with up to four per row. Layout of each list is improved. The borrower occupations summary is also more of a narrative flow and the two donut charts appear side by side (if there’s room). Similar improvements to the summary text in the other sections:

In the site-wide ‘books’ page the ‘change view’ and ‘limit’ sections now appear side by side and author view has the same blue backgrounds behind the author names. On the site-wide ‘borrwers’ page the ‘Limit the view’ section layout has been overhauled, giving it a two-column layout, ensuring it takes up much less space. It is still rather large, though. We could potentially hide it until the user chooses to open it. The list of borrowers is grid-based with up to fiveborrowers per row:

I’ve also massively overhauled the search forms in both the ‘simple’ and ‘advanced’ tabs. They now consist of multi-column displays grouped by data type. Tooltips are used where help information is included. Dotted lines are used to divide different types of data. Library registers with zero records are now excluded from the list:

There is still a fair amount to be done, including implement book genre, sorting out the highlighting in search results, investigating some situations when the year bar chart in the search results doesn’t display properly, adding in ‘cite this…’ options, adding in an ‘On this day’ feature and a ‘download data as CSV’ feature, update the API index page to add in information about licensing and to ensure all endpoints are listed with good examples, updating the API to ensure CSV output works properly for data that are arrays, integrating the dev site with the live site and ensuring all still works (e.g. the chambers map) and to add in a quick search option and navigation items as required, add in a cache for the facts and figures so it loads quicker and update the Solr index once work on the data is complete. But we’re getting there!

Also this week I began to write a requirements document for new date search / filter feature for the DSL website, along with sparklines and POS. I didn’t have the time to fully complete a first draft, but I did complete the sections about date searching and filtering so I sent it on to the DSL team for feedback.

I had to spend a bit of time this week migrating older sites over to external hosting, including the Emblems websites and the Forbes site. For the latter I took the opportunity to upgrade the site as it was still relying on a Flash based image viewer which would not work in any modern browser. I managed to switch this over to OpenLayers and now the site is working properly again in the first time for a few years (see https://forbes.gla.ac.uk/). I also set up a new website for an upcoming conference for Matthew Creasy. This took a little while to get right and will be launched in August.

For the Anglo-Norman Dictionary I had a lengthy email conversation with Geert about the new language tags and how these should be handled, especially in cases where the entry is a compound word. We managed to reach an agreement about how best to proceed with this and Geert is now going to add many more entries to the spreadsheet that should be given the language tags but did not previously include such a tag. I also spoke some more to Delphine about collaborative XML editors and did a bit more research into the options for these.

I’m on holiday next week and I’m attending the DH2023 conference the week after so I won’t be back in the office until after that.