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

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

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

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

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 It replicates Goldsworthy's Slide Cabinet Index, and includes previously unpublished material from Goldsworthy's Sketchbook Diaries.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

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

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 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

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 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

Week Beginning 30th October 2023

Posted on6th November 20236th November 2023Authorbaitken

I continued with the new ‘map-first’ front-end for the Iona project this week, adding in an option to reset the map to the default view on the ‘Home’ section adding the scale of the map to the bottom left. I then spent quite a bit of time working on a first version of the ‘Browse’ option. Pressing on the ‘Browse’ accordion header now displays a drop-down list through which you can select what type of browse you want to do. This defaults to ‘Current place-name’ and displays the letters that place-names begin with together with a count of the number of places beginning with each letter. The browse accordion replicates all that is found on the browse pages of the place-names resources I’ve previously developed (e.g. https://berwickshire-placenames.glasgow.ac.uk/place-names/?p=browse), but is much more efficient with the use of space. Pressing on a letter updates the map markers to only show those of places beginning with the letter, as the following screenshot demonstrates (with a pop-up open):

I haven’t implemented the automatic zooming to show all markers yet, and selected display options such as categorisation are not yet remembered, but I will be adding these features in. The other browse options are also all fully functioning, although ‘Parish’ might not be much use as currently every place-name is found in the same parish. ‘Source’ has a lot of data, but the area scrolls so I think it works ok. The screenshot below shows a browse for sources with ‘Admiralty Chart no. 2617’ selected:

I also implemented the quick search this week, which as with the other place-name resources searches current names, historical forms and elements. The screenshot below shows a search for ‘cnoc’, zoomed in on the north of the island with labels turned on:

Note that in addition to pressing the ‘reset map’ button on the ‘Home’ section if you’ve performed a quick search and want to reset things you can just delete the text from the searchbox and press the search button. I hope to be able to continue with this next week. The big things remaining are the advanced search, the full place-name record popup and also what to do about the elements glossary. There are lots of smaller things still to do too, such as allowing specific views to be bookmarked, shared and cited.

I spent most of the remainder of the week preparing the sites on our internally hosted server for an upgrade to PHP8. This involved getting PHP8 working on my local PC and then setting up each site locally with errors turned on in order to test each script. I’ve also been taking the opportunity to deal with any warnings and notices, plus upgrading jQuery where applicable. The only fatal issue I’ve encountered so far has been the use of the ‘usort’ function with a Boolen return value, which is deprecated in PHP 8 (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65382799/what-happened-in-php8-0-0-to-break-usort-intstrlenastrlenb). This has affected a few sites. Other than that I’ve not found anything that breaks in PHP8. I haven’t finished checking all sites yet, but will hopefully finish this tedious but necessary task next week.

Also this week I helped Petra Poncarova with an issue with her project website. She was wanting to add accordions to pages and I found and installed a plugin that works with the Classic WordPress editor (https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/easy-accordion-free/). It’s very easy to use and I added an accordion section to one of the pages on her site to show how it works: https://erskine.glasgow.ac.uk/people/donald-sinclair/.

I also gave some advice to Craig Lamont as he works on the banner for Rhona Brown’s new website, spoke to Thomas Clancy about another new place-names project and arranged to have a new WordPress site set up for a project Gavin Miller is setting up.