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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeing speech

The resource provides ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) and lip video of speech, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) video of speech, and 2D midsagittal head animations based on MRI and UTI data. 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

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

Week Beginning 29th July 2024

Posted on5th August 20245th August 2024Authorbaitken

I was on holiday for the previous two weeks and returned to a full week this week. I spent quite a bit of the week catching up with emails that had arrived whilst I was away and dealing with the issues contained in them. One such issue was sorting out the Italian Emblems website, which had been taken down during the College of Arts server crisis that we tackled more than a year ago. I wasn’t involved in the creation of the site, which was created almost 20 years ago, and hadn’t realised it was still offline until I received an email from someone in Special Collections. I worked with Luca this week to ensure the site’s code would work on a new server and had several email conversations to arrange for someone to be the named owner of the site, as all people involved in its creation are no longer associated with the university. We are now in a position where we can get the resource online again and are just waiting for someone in IT Services to sort out the domain, which will hopefully happen soon.

Also this week I sorted an issue with the Books and Borrowing content management system. A researcher is continuing to add data to the resource, even though the project has now officially ended, and was encountering an issue when attempting to associate existing book holding records with new borrowing records. It turns out the issue was book names that included double-quotes in their titles. These were resulting in malformed JSON files being sent to the book holding autocomplete field, meaning the list of possible books was not getting populated. We’d agreed back in the day that book titles should not include double-quotes, but ideally I should have added a check for this to the CMS. However, now that the project is officially over I decided the simplest fix would be to replace the offending double-quotes with curly double-quotes in the database and warn the researcher about using double-quotes in future.

I implemented a few other minor fixes for other projects this week, including updating a banner image on a project website and updating the Ayr Place-names map interface to ensure that when the map was reset the view also reset (previously the view remained focussed on the region the user was previously viewing). I also replied to an email from fellow developer David Wilson regarding linked open data and how we might host this and had an email conversation with Deven Parker about her 18^th century playbills project.

Before I went on my holiday a researcher who is creating a place-names project about Carrick in south Ayrshire. He is using an existing system for displaying map data called with GeoJSON Dashboard (https://github.com/fulcrumapp/geojson-dashboard) and wanted some advice on developing an advanced search. I spent some time this week looking into the tool, figuring out how it worked and giving some advice on how it could be updated.

Finally this week I devoted some time to a few outstanding issues relating to the new advanced search on the test version of the Dictionaries of the Scots Language. Although I completed work on this new version, with its sparklines and more comprehensive quotation search options many months ago we’ve still not gone live with it as the team are still testing things out. Before I went away they got back to me with some suggested updates and I implemented them this week. This included changing the way error messages are displayed when no search term is entered and updating how the system processes one single date being entered rather than a date range. Previously one single date was treated as a search for a specific year, but the team instead wanted this to be treated as a range, either from the given date to the end of the dictionary period when the ‘from’ box alone was populated or from the start of the dictionary period to the given date when the ‘to’ box was populated. I therefore updated the code to reflect this. A couple of further suggested updates were proposed, but I had some misgivings about implementing them and therefore replied to the team to voice these and ask for clarification. I’ve not heard back regarding these items yet so will just need to see what they think.