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

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

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

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 It replicates Goldsworthy's Slide Cabinet Index, and includes previously unpublished material from Goldsworthy's Sketchbook Diaries.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

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

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

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 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

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 18th September 2023

Posted on25th September 202325th September 2023Authorbaitken

On Monday and Tuesday this week I participated in the UCU strike action. On my return to work on Wednesday I focussed on writing a Data Management Plan for Jennifer Smith’s ESRC proposal that uses some of the SCOSYA data. After a few follow-up conversations I completed a version of the plan that Jennifer was happy with. I informed her that I’d be happy to help out with any further changes or discussions, but other than that my involvement is now complete.

I spent a fair bit of the remainder of the week trying to fix an old resource. I created the House of Fraser Archive site (https://housefraserarchive.ac.uk/) with Graeme Cannon more than twelve years ago, with Graeme doing the XML parts via an eXist-DB system and me doing the interface and all of the parts that processed and displayed data returned from eXist. Unfortunately the server the site was running on had to be taken offline and the system moved elsewhere. A newer version of eXist was required and the old libraries that were used to connect to the XML database would no longer work. I figured out a way to connect via an alternative method, but this then returned the data in a different structure. This meant I needed to update every page of the site that processed data to not only update the way the system was queried but also update the way the returned data was handled. This took quite a lot of time but I managed to get all of the ‘browse’ options plus the display of records, tags and images working. The only thing I couldn’t get to work was the search, as this seems to use further libraries that are no longer available. I the issue is structuring the query to work with eXist, but I am not much of an expert with eXist and I’m not really sure how to untangle things. I’ve asked Luca if he could have a look at it, as he’s use eXist a lot more than I have. I’ve not heard back from him yet, but hopefully we’ll manage to get the search working, otherwise we may have to remove the search and get people to rely on the browse functions to access the data instead.

For the rest of the week I returned to working on the Books and Borrowing project. One thing on my ‘to do’ list is to sort out the API. There are a few endpoints that I haven’t documented yet, plus the existing documentation and structuring of the API could be improved. I spent some time adding in a license statement and a ‘table of contents’ that lists all endpoints. I’m currently in the middle of adding in the missing endpoint descriptions. After that I’ll need to ensure the examples given all work and make sense and then I need to ensure the CSV output works properly for all data types. I’m fairly certain that some data held in arrays will not output properly as CSV at the moment and this definitely needs sorted.