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

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 It replicates Goldsworthy's Slide Cabinet Index, and includes previously unpublished material from Goldsworthy's Sketchbook Diaries.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week Beginning 22nd April 2024

Posted on29th April 202429th April 2024Authorbaitken

The Books and Borrowing project (https://borrowing.stir.ac.uk/) had its official launch on Friday this week, and it was great to celebrate the completion of a project that has been such a major part of my working life for these past four years. I spent a lot of this week preparing for the launch, at which I gave a talk about the creation of the resource. This covered the definition of the data structures, the creation of the database, the planning and development of the content management system and then the front-end and API for the project. There was a lot more I could have said about our use of technologies such as the IIIF server for images and Apache Solr for search facilities, but I had to keep the talk relatively brief and couldn’t include everything. I think my talk went pretty well, and it was also really great to hear from the other members of the project team, many of whom also gave talks about the research they had undertaken using the resource.

As part of my preparations I also get the site running on my laptop in case there were any issues with the server or general internet connection during the launch. I also spotted and fixed a small bug with the search results filter options. The filter by place of publication was working, but when a place was selected it was not getting ‘ticked’ in the left-hand filter options. This meant it was rather difficult to unselect the filter. The issue must have been introduced when I updated how publication places were stored in the Solr index a few months ago and thankfully I was able to fix it without having to regenerate the data.

Also this week I made a small tweak to the website for the International James Joyce Symposium (https://ijjf2024.glasgow.ac.uk/), adding a further logo and link to the footer. I also made a few more minor updates to the Speech Star website.

I also continued to work on the new language search for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary. I updated my data import scripts so that language data would be extracted during batch import of data and ensured existing language data was deleted during the process of deleting older data. I then updated the dictionary’s content management system to ensure that language data was properly dealt with when entries were added or edited through the system and updated the ‘view entry’ page in the system so that language data for each entry is now visible on the page, in the same way as parts of speech, labels and other data.

I spent the remainder of my week working on the Speak For Yersel follow-on projects, updating several of the questions for the Republic of Ireland, adding in introductory text for this survey area and updating all three survey areas to add some explanatory text to the start of each survey question.