I was back at work this week after a lovely week’s holiday in Mexico.  My biggest task of the week was to migrate the ‘map first’ place-names interface I’ve been working on for the Iona place-names project to the Ayr place-names resource.  The version I’ve created for the Iona project has not yet launched and the Ayr project is nearing completion so it looks like this might be the project that gets to launch the new interface first, but we’ll see.

It took a bit of time to migrate the interface as the Iona project is slightly different to the previous place-names projects I’ve worked on (Ayr, Galloway Glens and Berwickshire).  The resource has many bilingual fields to record Gaelic versions, it has a ‘flattened’ altitude range due to Iona being so close to the sea and it doesn’t feature parish boundaries as Iona is all in one parish.  To get the resource to work with the Ayr data I had to address all of these issues, wit the parish boundaries being the trickiest to get working.  In order to integrate these I needed to update the map’s ‘Display Options’ to add the option in and then update my code to incorporate a new display option.  As this needed to be represented in the page URL I needed to shift all parts of the URL relating to the search, browse and viewing of records along by one, and my code then needed to ensure this shift was represented throughout.  It was a bit of a pain to sort out but I got there.

I also made a new colour scheme for the Ayr map interface to differentiate it from the Iona one, but this is only temporary and we might change this before we go live.  I also added in a logo for the map (an ‘A’ for ‘Ayr’ taken from the background map of the website) but again this might be changed to something else (e.g. a ‘C’ or the Coalfield Communities icon if this is allowed), or removed entirely before the resource launches.  Below is a screenshot of the new map interface showing the results of a quick search for ‘Burn’ with place-name labels and parish boundaries (the orange lines) turned on using the OS1881 map:

I had two meetings this week, both on Tuesday.  The first was with my line manager Marc Alexander to discuss the logistics of the new project the Books and Borrowing team are putting a proposal together for.  I can’t say too much about this for the moment.  The second was with Deven Parker to discuss her Playbills project with a couple of people from Computing Science who are researching AI.  It was interesting to hear the possibilities that might be offered by AI in terms of extracting data form the Playbill images, although I think that we’ll need to discuss things with them in more detail if we are to ensure they fully understand the data and what we need to get out of it.  More discussions will no doubt follow.

I had an email discussion with Sofia from the Iona project about further updates to the map interface and to explain how to successfully import the data exported from the resource into Excel in a way that would ensure accented characters are not garbled.  I also gave some advice to Pauline Graham of the DSL about creating user accounts and helped Pauline MacKay of Scottish Literature with some issues she’d been having accessing the content management system for the Burns correspondence.  This project also encountered an issue later in the week whereby the scripts weren’t executing but were instead downloading.  This was very concerning and turned out to be a problem with our hosting company that we were thankfully able to fix.

Also this week I added feedback questionnaire popups, pages and menu items to the https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/speechstar/ and https://speechstar.ac.uk/ websites, made a few further tweaks to the text of each resource and gave some advice to Eleanor about accessing the Google Analytics stats for each site.

I was also asked to add a further library register to the Books and Borrowing resource.  This consisted of around 190 images, which were supplied as PNG files.  Unfortunately we need the images to be JPEGs to be consistent with all of our other images so I needed to figure out a way to convert the images.  Batch converting images from PNG to JPEG seems like the sort of thing that should be straightforward to do using Photoshop or even just in Windows, but despite trying several methods I didn’t find anything that worked.  Eventually I installed the ImageMagick command-line tool and used a single command:

magick mogrify -format jpg *.png

That converted all of the files in one go, as detailed here: https://imagemagick.org/script/mogrify.php.  Unfortunately I then discovered that my access to the Stirling VPN had been blocked so I was unable to access the project’s server.  Unblocking my access required authorisation from a few people and by the end of the week the process had still not been completed so as of yet I haven’t been able to complete this task.

Finally this week we received some feedback from the testing of the new Wales ‘Speak For Yersel’ resource, which required me to make many changes to the project’s data.  This included replacing existing and adding new sound files, adding new answer options, updating questions and adding new ones.  I also fixed a bug that had been caused by a difference in the way blank fields were stored in the database for new questions that I’d added a while back.  These were classed as ‘empty’ for previously created data but ‘null’ for the new data (two different things in databases) and my code wasn’t dealing with the ‘null’ values properly.  I made the fields blank instead, which has thankfully sorted things.  Note that the data was all recorded successfully for survey responses – the issue was purely with their display on the maps.  I also spotted that some map markers for the ‘Mate’ question were not displaying properly due to the sheer number of possible options being greater than my code was set up to work with.  I added in some new marker colours and this addressed the issue.