I spent a fair amount of time this week preparing for my PDR session – bringing together information about what I’ve done over the past year and filling out the necessary form.  I also had a meeting with Jennifer Smith to discuss an ESRC proposal she’s putting together using some of the data from the SCOSYA project and then spent some further time after the meeting researching some tools the project might use and reading the Case for Support.

I also spent a bit of time working for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, updating the XSLT file to better handle varlists in citations.  So for example instead of:

( MS: s.xiiiex )  Satureia: (A6) gallice savoroye (var. saveray  (A9) MS: c.1300 ;  saveroy  (A12) MS: s.xiii4/4 ;  savoreie  (B3) MS: s.xiv4/4 ;  savoré  (C35) MS: s.xv )  Plant Names 230

we’d have:

( MS: s.xiiiex )  Satureia: (A6) gallice savoroye (var.  (A9: c.1300) saveray; (A12: s.xiii4/4) saveroy; (B3: s.xiv4/4) savoreie;  (C35: s.xv) savoré)  Plant Names 230

I completed an initial version of the update using test files and after discussions with the editor Geert and a few minor tweaks the update went live on Wednesday.

I also spent a bit of time working to fix the House of Fraser Archive website, which I created with Graeme Cannon many moons ago.  It uses an eXist XML database but needed to be migrated to a new server with more modern versions due to security issues.  I spent some time figuring out how to connect to the new eXist database and had just managed to find a solution when the server went down and I was unable to access it.  It was still offline at the end of the week, which is a bit frustrating.

I also made a couple of minor tweaks to a conference website for Matthew Creasy and gave some advice to Ewan Hannaford about adding people to a mailing list.  My updates to the DSL also went live this week on the DSL’s test server, and I emailed the team a detailed report of the changes, highlighting points for discussion.  I’m sure I’ll need to make a number of changes to the features I’ve developed over the past few weeks once the team have had a chance to test things out.  We’ll see what they say once they get back to me.

I was also contacted this week by Eleanor Lawson with a long list of changes she wanted me to make to the two Speech Star websites.  Many of these were minor tweaks to text, but there were some larger issues too.  I needed to update the way sound filters appear on the website in order to group different sounds together and to ensure the sounds always appear in the correct order.  This was a pretty tricky thing to accomplish as the filters are automatically generated and vary depending on what other filter options the user has selected.  It took a while to get working, but I got there in the end, thankfully.  Eleanor had also sent me a new set of videos that needed to be added to the Edinburgh MRI Modelled Speech Corpus.  These were chunks of some of the existing videos as a decision had been made that splitting them up would be more useful for users.  I therefore had to process the videos and add all of the required data for them to the database.  All is looking good now, though.

Next week I’ll be participating in the UCU strike action on Monday and Tuesday so it’s going to be a short week for me.