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

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

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

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

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

Books and Borrowing: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers, 1750-1830

Books and Borrowing uncovers and reinterprets the history of reading in Scotland in the period 1750 to 1830 through 144,000 borrowing records across 18 libraries. 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

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

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

Interactive Map of Burns Suppers Worldwide

Featuring more than 1000 Burns Suppers across all 7 continents and in 75 countries around the world, this resource seeks to record, illustrate, and offer new insights into the ways in which the tradition of the Burns Supper continues to be maintained, adapted and reimagined in the 21^st century. Find out more

Week Beginning 11th March 2024

Posted on18th March 202418th March 2024Authorbaitken

I spent some time this week further tweaking the Speak For Yersel survey tool I’ve been working on recently. I completed an initial version of the tool last week, using it to publish a test version of the linguistic survey for the Republic of Ireland (not yet publicly available) and this week I ran the data for Northern Ireland through the tool. As I did so I began to think about the instructions that would be needed at each stage and I also reworked the final stages of the tool.

The final stage previously involved importing the area GeoJSON file and the settlement CSV file in order to associate actual settlements with larger geographical areas and to generate the areas within which survey responses will be randomly assigned a location. This was actually a two-step process and I therefore decided to split the stage in two, firstly ensuring the GeoJSON file is successfully parsed and imported and only then importing the settlement CSV file. I also created a final ‘setup complete’ stage as well, as previously the tool didn’t give any feedback that the process had completed successfully.

With the updates in place creating the Northern Ireland survey using the tool was a pretty straightforward process, taking a matter of minutes. I then moved on to creating our third and final survey for Wales, but unfortunately I soon realised that we didn’t have a top-level ‘regions’ GeoJSON file for this survey area. The ‘regions’ file provides the broadest level of geographical areas and are visible on the maps when you hover over areas. For example in the original SFY resource for Scotland there are 14 top-level regions such as ‘Fife’ or ‘Borders’ with labels that are visible when using the map such as the ones here: https://speakforyersel.ac.uk/explore-maps/lexical/.

Initially I tried creating my own regions in QGIS using the area GeoJSON file to group areas by the region contained in the settlement CSV files (e.g. ‘Anglesey’). However, this resulted in around 22 regions, which I think is too many for a survey area the size of Wales – for the Republic of Ireland we have 8 and for Northern Ireland we have 11. I asked the team about this and they are going to do some investigation so until I hear back from them Wales is on hold.

I also spent quite a bit of time this week continuing to migrate the Anthology of 16th and Early 17th Century Scots Poetry from ancient HTML to TEI XML. Previously the poems I’ve been migrating have varied from 14-line sonnets to poems up to around 200 lines in length. I’ve been manually copying each line into the Oxygen XML editor as I needed to check and replace ‘3’ characters that had been used to represent yoghs, add in the glosses and check for other issues. This week I reached the King’s Quair, which compared to the other poems is a bit of an epic, weighing in at over 1300 lines. I realised manually pasting in each line wasn’t an option if I wanted to keep my sanity and therefore I wrote a little jQuery script that extracted the text from the HTML table cell and generated the necessary XML line syntax. I was then able to run the script, make a few further tweaks to line groups and then paste the whole poem into Oxygen. This was significantly quicker than manual migration, but I did still need to add in the glosses, of which there were over 200, so it still took some time. I continued to import other poems using my new method and I really feel like I’ve broken the back of the anthology now – and by the end of the week I’ve completed the migration of 114 poems. Hopefully I’ll be able to launch the new site before Easter.

Also this week I began investigating the WCAG accessibility guidelines (https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/quickref/?versions=2.1) after we received a request about an accessibility statement for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary. I spoke to a few people in the University who have used accessibility tools to validate websites and managed to perform an initial check of the AND website, which held up pretty well. I’m intending to look through the guidelines and tools in greater details and hopefully update the sites I manage to make them more accessible after Easter.

Also this week I spoke to Susan Rennie about transferring ownership of the Scots Thesaurus domain to her after the DNS registration expires in April, added some statements to a couple of pages of the Books and Borrowing website referencing the project’s API and giving some information about it, and spoke to B&B project PI Katie Halsey about creating a preservation dataset for the project and depositing it with a research repository.