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

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 It replicates Goldsworthy's Slide Cabinet Index, and includes previously unpublished material from Goldsworthy's Sketchbook Diaries.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

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

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: 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

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

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

Week Beginning 13th November 2023

Posted on20th November 202320th November 2023Authorbaitken

This week I began the major task of integrating book genre with the Books and Borrowing dataset. The team had been working on a spreadsheet that enabled them to assign top-level Book Work records to more than 13,000 Book Edition records and also assign up to three genres to each Work. I had to write a script to parse this data, which involved extracting and storing the distinct genres, creating Book Work records, assigning Book Work authors, adding in associations to Book Edition records, deleting any author associations at Edition level and creating associations between Works and genres. It took the best part of two days to create and test the script, running it on a local version of the data stored on my laptop. After final testing the number of active Book Works increased from 75 to 9808 and the number of active Book Editions that have a Work association grew from 72 to 13,099. The number of genre connections for Works stood at 11,536 and the number of active Book Works that have at least one author association stood at 9,808, up from 70, while the number of active Book Editions with at least one direct author association decreased to 2,191 from 14,384, due to the author association being shifted up to Work (and it will cascade from there).

With the data import sorted I then moved onto updating the project’s content management system to incorporate all facilities to add, edit, browse and delete genres. This included creating facilities for associating genres with book records at any level (from Work down to Item) wherever books can be edited in the CMS. The ‘Browse Genres’ page works in a similar way to ‘Browse Authors’, giving you a list of genres and a count of the number of each book at each level that has an association, as the following screenshot shows:

Pressing on a number opens a pop-up containing a list of the associated books and you can connect through to each book record from this. As with authors, genre will cascade down from whichever level of book it is associated with to all lower levels. You only need to make an association at a lower level if it differs from the genre at a higher level. The counts in the ‘browse’ page show only the direct associations, so for now there are no editions or lower with any numbers listed. Wherever a book at any level can be edited in the CMS a new ‘Genre’ section has been added to the edit form. This consists of a list of genres with checkboxes beside them, as the following screenshot demonstrates:

You can tick as many checkboxes as are required and when updating the record the changes will be made. I tested out the new genre features in the CMS and all seem to be working well. I also imported all of the genre data so hopefully everything is now in place. Next week I will move onto the front-end, where there is much to do – not only making genre visible wherever books are viewed but updating the search facilities and adding in a number of new visualisations for genre as well. I also fixed a few issues with images of Registers from the Royal High School – a few that were missing I added in and the order of others needed to be updated.

Also this week I finalised the new project website for Rhona Brown’s new project. It’s not live yet, but my work on it is now complete. I was also involved in the migration of a number of my sites to a new server. As always seems to be the case, the DSL website migration did not go very smoothly, with the DNS update taking a many hours to propagate and in the meantime the domain was serving up the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, which was not good at all. This wasn’t something I had any direct control over, unfortunately, but thankfully the situation rectified itself the following day.

I also had to make a number of tweaks to the data in the Child speech error database for Speech Star, after many transcriptions were revised. I also updated the Mull / Ulva place-names CMS to add in a facility to export place-names for publication limited by one or more selected islands. In addition I began creating a new website for a project Gavin Miller is running and I created some new flat spreadsheet exports of the Historical Thesaurus for Fraser Dallachy and Marc Alexander to work with.