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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week Beginning 20th May 2024

Posted on28th May 202428th May 2024Authorbaitken

This was a week of working on many different projects for me. I spent some time making final tweaks to the Speech Star websites (https://speechstar.ac.uk/ and https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/speechstar/) as the project officially came to an end this week. This included adding new videos, replacing existing videos, updating the metadata, updating the site text and adding in a few new images. Both resources have come together really well and I’m sure they will be hugely useful for speech therapy for a long time to come.

I also made a further update to the Anglo-Norman Dictionary resource related to the new ‘language’ search I added in last week. After this had gone live I had intended to make the languages in the entries link to the search results and I spent a bit of time getting this working. This involved updating the XSLT, the CSS and the JavaScript used to display the dictionary entries and the update is not live yet, but it’s in place on a test page and works pretty well. See the ‘(loanword….’ section in the following screenshot to see how it will work:

I also replied to a number of emails that had been sent to me from Ann Fergusson of the DSL regarding the new date search and sparklines that I developed for the project many months ago but is still to go live. Ann gave me some feedback on a number of issues and I spent some time making updates. The big change will be to the way dates of attestation that are before or after the active period of the dictionary in question. I’m going to have to update the way the sparkline data is generated, which may take some time. I’ll hopefully be able to look into this next week.

For the new regions of the Speak For Yersel project I updated the privacy policies and now everything is ready for us to begin sending out the URLs for the new areas for test purposes and for the Books and Borrowing project I wrote a couple of scripts to find and then generate some missing pages from the registers of Selkirk library. The first script identified page images that we have on the server for the two registers that do not have corresponding page records in our database. The script was set to output a 300px wide version of each missing image plus its filename and it was also possible to click on the image to view a full-size version. It turned out that the majority of the missing images were omitted for a reason – they were either blank or didn’t contain borrowing records. We decided that 70 images needed to be added in and 117 could be safely ignored. My second script then added in the missing pages. This took a bit of time to get working as not only did I need to create the pages, I also needed to ensure they were slotted into the correct place, updating the ‘next’ and ‘previous’ links and the page order as required. But the pages are now available and someone can begin the process of transcribing the borrowing records found on the pages.

I also spent about a day or so this week creating a content management system for the Burns Letter Writing Trail, which will be an interactive map of Burns’ correspondence that will eventually be added to https://www.burnsc21-letters-poems.glasgow.ac.uk/. I can’t really say much more about it at this stage, but the CMS is about 80% complete and I hope to finish the rest next week.

Finally, I spent about a day looking through the images and YAML files of playbills from the 19^th century for Deven Parker. The images are generally a relatively small file size but they are actually pretty high resolution and I think they will work in a ‘zoom and pan’ interface. As an experiment I set up such an interface for one image, using the same JavaScript library I used for the Books and Borrowing project. I spent the rest of the day getting to grips with the YAMP files, building up my understanding of the textual data, sketching out an initial relational database structure that could be used for the project and compiling a list of questions for Deven. I’ll probably have to meet with her to go through these and see if or how my involvement with the project will develop.