I spent a fair amount of time this week continuing to work on the Burns Correspondence map.  Map markers are now currently all in grey by default, and I’ve added in grey dotted lines showing the connections between places.  This results in a very cluttered map with all data visible, but of course once filters are applied (not yet developed) the map will contain less data.  It is also now possible to press on a marker to highlight the place, the connections and the places connected to.  This highlights the pressed on place with a red border, turns the connecting lines red and highlights the connected locations with a black border.  I had previously allowed the user to select multiple locations but I decided this just made things messy so now if you select a different location your previous selection is unselected and replaced with the new selection.

I also worked on a map menu, which now has four tabs:  Home (which will include an introduction to the resource and a ‘reset map’ button (not currently operational); Correspondence, which will contain all information pertaining to the location the user presses on; Filters which will contain the filter options and Timeline, which will include the facility to animate the correspondence over time.

I’m still in the middle of working on the Correspondence tab.  When you press on a location marker this tab gets selected (if the menu is currently hidden it opens) and all of the correspondence sent from/to this location will be listed, in date order.  For now only the dates are displayed, with correspondence items split into sections by year.  There is going to be rather a lot of data contained in each of these sections, and I might add in an option to further expand the menu to help people view the data.  We might want to give the option of switching from a ‘compact’ to an ‘expanded’ view of the data, with things like the bibliographies only appearing in the latter.  I did this for the Books and Borrowing project and it worked pretty well – see https://borrowing.stir.ac.uk/search/0/0/0/advanced/bhids|9803 with the ‘switch to…’ option in the menu bar to the right of the ‘Search Results’ text.  I might also add in a further highlighting option whereby people can press on the correspondence item in the menu and see its corresponding line on the map.  Below is a screenshot of the ‘full screen’ view with ‘Lochlie’ selected so you can see how things currently look.  There’s clearly still a lot to do, but I feel that I’ve made some pretty good progress this week.

I participated in two meeting this week with researchers who are putting together proposals that I’ll be involved with.  The first was with Garrick Allen in Theology and the second was with Emily Pickard in Scottish Literature.  I needed to spend some time prior to each meeting reading through the proposal documentation and preparing some notes and questions, and then some further time after each meeting writing some materials to be included and responding to questions raised.  Both meetings went very well and hopefully both researcher will secure their respective funding.

I also had a further email conversation with Gerry Carruthers and members of his team about their new proposal and fixed a small bug in the new DSL sparklines that I’d introduced last week.  I also removed a video that needed to be taken down from the Speech Star website, made a few further tweaks to the contents of the Irish and Northern Irish surveys for Speak For Yersel and make a few minor changes to the Anthology of 16th and Early 17th Century Scots Poetry.

I spent the remainder of the week working on the article about the development of the Books and Borrowing resource that I’m writing with Katie and Matt.  I made good progress on my sections and I hope to get a first draft finished next week.