I spent quite a bit of this week working on the final part of my new interface mockups for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language:  the search results.  This took rather longer than I’d initially anticipated as there was much to consider and implement, such as the filter options, the navigation, the sparklines and how to handle results for both quick search and advanced search, and for both one dictionary and two.

I can’t really share the mockups at this stage, unfortunately, but I’ll describe how the new search results page functions.  The SND and DOST search results (i.e. the ‘quick search’) work in the same way: the page begins with a search bar, allowing you to perform another search immediately from the results page.  Next there is a ‘header’ section like the new ‘entry’ page containing information about your search:  the term, the dictionary, the search type (e.g. Headword) and how the results are ordered, which I’ve added as text rather than as a tooltip.  Then there is a row of options as buttons, as with the ‘entry’ page.  As these searches are headword searches I’ve added in the ‘Filter results’ option.  Pressing on this scrolls down a box containing the filter options, as with our still to be made live test site.  This scrolls up/down when you press the button in the mock-up, but no filter options actually work.

Below the header is the main search results section, which currently has a similar layout to the current test site:  a navigation bar above and below the results, which appear one per line, are numbered and have the first date of attestation and sparkline to the right.

For the ‘Advanced Search’ results the layout is mostly similar but differs in a few ways.  The header now lists both dictionaries (assuming both have been selected in the search) and more complete information about the search options will be displayed.  The option buttons are different for the advanced search, and would also need to include the ‘filter’ option for a different search type (it’s not relevant to the mockup search type).  This might mean I’d need to rethink the layout of these buttons as they’re already the full width of the screen on narrow displays.

The advanced search results feature the snippets and highlighting, which are handled in a similar manner to the live site for now and for the results themselves I initially replicated the approach taken on the live site, whereby SND and DOST results are presented in two separate panels side-by-side.  However, I’ve decided to go with a tab-based approach instead.  As the majority of users access the site on mobile devices it is likely that the ‘side-by-side’ panels in my first attempt will never be seen by them anyway, but instead the DOST panel will appear below the SND one, making it unclear that the DOST results are even there.  Instead I’ve added in a new tab section below the results header for ‘Modern Scots’ and ‘Older Scots’ with a count of the number of results for each included in the tab.  You can easily press on the other tab to view the results for the other dictionary and there is much more room for the results.  It does mean it’s no longer possible to view both SND and DOST results simultaneously and I don’t know how much of an issue this may be – but as I say, most users won’t see the results side-by-side anyway due to their narrow screens.

Also this week I packaged up the Bilingual Thesaurus code and a sample of the data and sent it to a researcher who will be repurposing it for a new project.  It took a bit of time to reach an agreement about how much and which data could be included as the Bilingual Thesaurus people didn’t want too much of it to be shared, and I had to ensure that there was a decent spread of categories across multiple hierarchical levels otherwise the tree structure wouldn’t display properly.  I got there in the end, though.

I also spent some time on issues relating to the new proposal the Books and Borrowing people are putting together.  I can’t really go into too much detail about this and my potential role in the project, but it did take up a fair bit of my time.  Also for the Books and Borrowing project this week my VPN access at Stirling was finally reinstated so I was able to complete the upload of the new borrowing register images for Orkney.  This consisted of almost 200 page images, for which I also generated page records in the CMS.

I also continued to help Deven Parker prepare sample materials for her Playbills project that she will sent to the AI people in Computing Science ad then rounded off the week with some Anglo-Norman Dictionary duties.  The editor Geert had contacted me to say that he’d spotted a part of speech for an entry wasn’t appearing in the ‘summary’ section of the entry page and wanted me to investigate.

It turned out that the issues was a <note> tag that was appearing immediately after the <pos> tag.  The XSLT was expecting a <sense> or <subsense> element to immediately follow a <pos> and if this condition was not met the summary data was not extracted.  I tweaked the XSLT so it can deal with <note> elements that appear between <pos> and <sense> or <subsense> now and this did the trick.

Finally, Delphine, the other editor of the AND contacted me with two further texts to add to the ‘textbase’ of source texts that we publish on the site.  These texts had a slightly different XML structure to the previous new texts I’d uploaded so I needed to check how the integration process worked.  All worked fine with the first text, although the <pb> element was missing ‘ed=”base”’ which caused the page breaks to fail until I fixed things.

The second text did however cause some problems.  It was an updated version of an existing text so I needed to delete all data relating to the text that was already in the system, which meant I needed to write and test a script that would do this, deleting the text, all of its pages and all of the individual word records that were stored in the database for the concordance and proximity searches.  I managed to create the script and delete all of the data, but when I processed the new XML file the notes were failing to load into the page.  I realised this was because the page IDs contained characters that are not allowed in IDs, namely full stops, spaces and occasionally square brackets (e.g. n=”f. [211rb]”).  Ihad to update these to remove the characters and I added a dash between the ‘f’ and the rest (e.g. n=”f-211rb”) and this has thankfully fixed the issue and all is now well.

I wil be on holiday for the next two weeks so there will be no further posts from me until August.