I continued to work on the new Speak For Yersel survey creation tool this week, using the Republic of Ireland as my test area.  I managed to complete the ‘maps’ pages, which let users view all of the survey data on interactive maps.  We’re still testing the new system so there’s not much data to actually view, but below is a screenshot showing one of the maps:

I also tweaked things to make it possible to cite / share / bookmark a specific map.  This does mean that each time you select a different map the entire page needs to reload (as opposed to replacing the map only) but I think it’s handy to be able to link to specific maps and reloading the page is not a massive issue.  The ‘attribution and copyright’ link in the bottom right of the map also now works, with the content of this being set in the config file so it’s easy to change.

I then moved onto the stats and data download page for project staff.  As with SFY you can specify a period to limit the stats and data to the period given.  As with SFY, the number of users and answers for each survey (within and beyond the area of study) are listed.  Unlike SFY, there are also options to download this data as CSV files.  You can download the users, or you can download the answers for a chosen survey, with options for downloading data for users within the area of study or outside it.  Answer downloads also include fields about the user (and the question).  Here’s a screenshot of how the interface looks:

That’s the tool pretty much completed now and I just need to see if there’s any feedback from the project team before I create similar resources for Northern Ireland and Wales using the tool.

I spent much of Monday going through the content management system for the Saints Places website, fixing errors that had appeared as a result of the migration to the site to a new server earlier in the year.  I didn’t create this site or its CMS, but have inherited responsibility for it.  The site (https://saintsplaces.gla.ac.uk/) launched more than ten years ago, with the project officially ending in 2013, but a researcher is still making updates to it so I agreed to get things working again.  It took somewhat longer than I’d expected but at least it’s done now.  Having said that it’s possible more errors lurk in places I’ve not been able to fully test so we’ll just need to see.

On Tuesday I participated in a meeting with Calum McMillan about ‘Change management’ in IT services at the University.  This is about tracking what changes are made to IT systems, ensuring people are informed and strategies are in place in the event of changes failing.  It was very interesting to hear more about this and I hope Arts developers will be kept informed of any changes that will be made to the servers on which our sites are hosted.

I had a further meeting on Friday with Matthew Creasy and his RA Jennifer Alexander about the James Joyce conference website (https://ijjf2024.glasgow.ac.uk/).  I helped out with a couple of technical issues, gave some advice on how to present some materials and made a couple of minor tweaks to the website interface.  I also updated the Seeing Speech (https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/), Dynamic Dialects (https://www.dynamicdialects.ac.uk/)  and Speech Star (https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/speechstar/) websites to add in licensing and copyright statements.

I also returned to the new data and sparkline facilities for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language.  I’d developed these features last year and had been waiting for feedback from the DSL people, which finally came last week.  One thing they had agreed on was that we should limit the start date of the sparklines to 1375.  When a refamiliarized myself with the work I’d previously done on the sparklines several months ago I realised I still needed to regenerate the data to make the DOST sparklines begin in 1375, and I also realised that the data displayed on our test server was not the current version (featuring the 50 year cut-off and SND extended to 2005) and that this data only existed on my laptop.  I then had a moment of panic when I realised I’d deleted data from my laptop since I completed work on the date features last year, but thankfully I’ve managed to reinstate it.

I also realised that the way dates outside the sparkline’s range are handled will need to be changed.  The way things are currently set up is that any dates that are beyond the scope of the sparkline result in the sparkline being ‘on’ at the start or end date to demonstrate that the entry is attested beyond the sparkline range.  Dates before / after the sparkline start / end date then become the start / end date and are not individually displayed in the sparkline text, and the new start date is then treated as the start date for the purpose of the 50 year rule (for generating blocks of attestation where individual dates are found within 50 years of each other).

This currently happens on our test server for an SND entry where the earliest citation date is 1568 and the second earliest is 1721.  When the sparkline data is generated 1568 becomes 1700 (the start year for SND) and as the gap between this and the next citation is less than the rule the sparkline displays a block from 1700-1721.  The ‘dates of attestation’ hover-over and in-page text then display ‘1700-1721’ which is not at all accurate.

We need to have some kind of line on the sparkline at the start / end to demonstrate an entry’s dates of attestation continue beyond the scope, so for the above example there must be a line at 1700, even though this actually represents the year 1568.  However, such a line needs to be flagged in the system as to be ignored for the purposes of building the blocks so that when the system finds the next date (1721) it compares this to the original date (1568) and not the line created at 1700.  The system would therefore not generate a block from 1700-1721 but instead would create an individual line at 1721 (with an individual line at 1700 as well).

We will also need to ensure that the sparkline text includes all attestations before the sparkline’s start year rather than bundling these all up as ‘1700’.  Actually, I guess there are two options here:  We could just bundle them all up and display ‘<1700’ or we could display them all.  It depends how verbose we want to be and how important it is to list all of the dates beyond the scope of the sparkline.  For the example above the text would either start ‘<1700, 1721, 1773-1825’ or it would start ‘1568, 1721, 1773-1825’.  The same process would also need to happen at the end of the sparkline too.  This needs further discussion with the team before I proceed further.

Despite this issue needing further consideration, I did manage to make a number of other updates to the test site based on the team’s feedback.  This included updating the CSV download on the search results page to add in the search criteria, changing the wording of the advanced search results page, removing date filter options from the search results pages in many situations (e.g. quotation searches) and changing how the filter options are displayed, moving from an always visible approach to a drop-down section that appears only when a user chooses to open it.

Finally this week I continued to work through the Anthology of 16th and Early 17th Century Scots Poetry and I’m now slightly over half-way through the migration of the ancient HTML to TEI XML.