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

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

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

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

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

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

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 It replicates Goldsworthy's Slide Cabinet Index, and includes previously unpublished material from Goldsworthy's Sketchbook Diaries.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

Week Beginning 9th October 2023

Posted on23rd October 202323rd October 2023Authorbaitken

I came down with some sort of flu-like illness last Friday evening and was still unwell on Monday and unable to work. Thankfully I was well enough to work again on Tuesday, although getting through the day was hard work. I was also off on holiday on Friday this week so only ended up working three days. I’ll be on holiday all of next week as well as it’s the school half-term and we have a family holiday booked.

I was involved in the migration of the Historical Thesaurus website to a new server for a lot of this week. This required a lot of testing of the newly migrated site and a significant number of small updates to the code to ensure everything worked properly. Thankfully by Thursday all was working well and I was able to go on my holiday without worrying about the site.

Also this week I did some further work on the Books and Borrowing project, which included generating several different spreadsheets of book holdings that have no associated borrowing records and discussing the options of creating downloadable bundles of all data associated with each specific library.

I also did some work for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, including investigating an issue with the new quotations search that is not yet live but is running on our test server. A phrase search for quotations was now working, but an identical phrase search using the full-text index was working fine. This was a bit of a strange one as it looks like the new Solr quotation search is not picking up the fact that a phrase search is being run. I tried running the search directly on the Solr instance I’d set up on my laptop and the same thing was happening: I gave it a phrase surrounded by double quotes but these were being ignored. An identical search on the fulltext Solr index picked up the presence of quotes and successfully performed a search for the phrase. The only difference between the two fields is that the fulltext fields was set to ‘text_general’ while the quote search was set to ‘text_en’. I therefore set up a new version of the quote index with the field set to ‘text_general’ and this solved the problem. I’m still in the dark as to why, though, and I can’t find any information online about the issue.

I also responded to a request from Craig Lamont in Scottish Literature about a new proposal he’s putting together. If it gets funded I’ll be involved with the project, making a website, an interactivem map and a timeline. I also had a conversation with Rhona Brown about the website for her new project, which I’ll set up after I’m back from my holiday.