I received an email from Theo Van Heijnsberg in Scottish Literature over the weekend alerting me to the fact that one of the old STELLA resources that is still used for teaching was no longer available.  At the end of last year we’d shut down the server that was hosting the old STELLA resources, and at the time we thought we’d migrated all of the resources that were still being used but I guess this one was overlooked.  We had of course taken backups of the server before we shut it down so it was relatively easy to find and restore the resource, especially as it was an old plain HTML website that was last updated way back in 1999.  The website (An Anthology of 16th and Early 17th Century Scots Poetry) can now be found here: https://stella.glasgow.ac.uk/anthol/title.html.

As the website needs to continue to be hosted I decided that I should probably update the interface to bring it into the 21^st century.  I therefore spent a bit of time creating a Bootstrap based interface, which is fairly unadorned and retains the logo.  I’ve added in a footer with links that University websites are now required to feature.  There is also a ‘Top’ button that appears as you scroll down the page, allowing you to quickly return to the top.  The homepage features two columns, one with the contents and the other containing the ‘Editors’ text.  So far I’ve only added content to the ‘Alexander Scott’ page.  This currently features the list of poems and the first two poems.  Pressing on the title of one of these in the list scrolls the page to the relevant point (you can use the ‘Top’ button to return to the list).  There is a button for returning to the contents page at the top (pressing on the site title or logo does the same).  Here’s a screenshot of how the new site currently looks:

The biggest issue is that the poems are all marked up in very old HTML using tables for layout and tags that were find in 1999 but are not great to use now.  In order to extract the text I need to copy and paste each individual line, line number and gloss into a new HTML structure.  After doing this for two poems I decided that instead of doing this it would be better to migrate the text to TEI XML and to store the data separately from the presentation.  That way it will be much easier to reuse the poems in future.  I would then write a script to transform the XML into the required HTML for display on the site.  However, after deciding this Theo got back to me to say that another project at St. Andrews is going to use the data from the resource and incorporate it into a larger online resource.  This project is still just at the planning stages, but it’s likely the Anthology website will not be needed for much longer.  I’ll probably still explore the XML pathway, though, as it’s a useful exercise to hone my XML skills.  It will take me some time to go through more than 100 poems, though, and I’ll need to do this between my commitments to funded research projects.

Also this week I did some further work for the Books and Borrowing project.  I fixed an image that wasn’t working in one of the Royal High School registers and reassigned images to one of the Orkney registers due to a duplicate image throwing everything from that point onwards off by one.  I also updated the website interface to ensure that tables work better on narrow screens.  I applied a minimum width of 800px to tables (e.g. the tabular list of libraries and the lists or registers), meaning on very narrow screens the tables no longer get squashed into spaces that make them entirely unusable but instead extend beyond the width of the screen and you need to scroll to view their full contents.  It seems to work ok on my rather ancient phone.

On Wednesday we were finally ready to generate the final pre-publication cache files, so I completed this task – updating all of the caches and generating a new Solr index file.  Once this had been set up for us by Stirling’s IT people I then updated the connection details in the API.  Also in this update I fixed an issue with the place of publication in the advanced search.  Previously if you typed in ‘london’ (lower case) and didn’t select ‘London’ form the drop-down list and then pressed the ‘search’ button you found no results as publication place was case sensitive.  The correct results are now returned.  I wasn’t able to ‘go live’ with the new site this week, however, due to other commitments.  I’ll start on this first thing next week.

On Thursday this week I attended a staff meeting in Edinburgh for the DSL.  Several new members of staff have joined the DSL recently and a meeting was arranged so everyone could get together, which is quite a rare occurrence, especially as the DSL do not have offices since the Lockdown happened.  I gave a little talk about the DSL’s website and my role in the DSL, and gave a brief history of the development of the DSL’s website.  It will be ten years this September since we launched the modern DSL website, which is quite a milestone.  It was a really great opportunity to meet everyone and we had a lovely meal out afterwards in a private dining room at the Scottish Arts Club.

I also continued with the new map of Iona place-names this week, tiocking some more items of my ‘to do’ list.  I made some further updates to the map legend.  When categorising markers by code or element language the marker colours are now fixed.  I’ve gone with shades of purple for ‘Gaelic’ and shades of blue for ‘SSE’ in the languages while in the classification codes coastal features are sandy colours, water is blue, vegetation is green etc.

I also worked on the ordering of the items in the legends for classification codes and languages.  Previously the order was pretty arbitrary and depended on the order the items were found in the results.  Now the groupings are ordered alphabetically, except for ‘Gaelic’ groups, which appear first.  I’m afraid ‘en’ appears last, though, as ordering is case sensitive.  I did attempt to negate this, but this caused other problems so I’ve kept it as it is.  I also ensured that ‘Gaelic’ and ‘SSE’ always come first in the order of languages (e.g. ‘Gaelic & en’ and not ‘en & Gaelic’) and I added tooltips for language groupings that need them.  Here’s a screenshot showing the new legend and colours:

I also added in the ‘Cite’ text to the record, so when opening a full record if you select the ‘cite this record’ tab you’ll see the citation options.  I also added in the citation option for the map as a whole (the ‘cite’ button in the left-hand menu).  This has taken some time to implement as the citation text needed to include descriptive text to reflect the options that have been selected, including the base map, the classification type and whether the map is displaying a browse, a quick search or an advanced search, plus which exact options have been selected.

So for example when browsing for all current names starting with ‘S’ using the modern OS map, categorised by language and you press on the ‘Cite’ button the APA style of citation is formatted to display the following:

Map of Iona’s place-names: browse for place-names starting with ‘S’, classified by language, base map: modern OS. 2024. In Iona’s Namescape. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. Retrieved 19 January 2024, from [Map URL here].

Next week I’ll begin on the tabular view of the data, as well as going live with the Books and Borrowing site.