James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was a major figure in 19th century printmaking and created 490 etchings. Over 9500 impressions of these prints have been located and investigated during the project, which completes a series of catalogues raisonnés of Whistler's oeuvre. 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

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

Curious Travellers

The project explores Romantic-period accounts of journeys into Wales and Scotland with a focus on the writings of the Flintshire naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), whose published Tours of both countries did so much to awaken public interest in the ‘peripheries’ of Britain. 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

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

Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus

The Metaphor Map of English shows the metaphorical links which have been identified between different areas of meaning. These links can be from the Anglo-Saxon period right up to the present day so the map covers 1300 years of the English language. 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

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 16th September 2024

Posted on23rd September 202423rd September 2024Authorbaitken

I had my PDR session this week, which was all very positive. I also spoke to Jane Stuart-Smith about adding data to the VARICS project website, which I’ll take forward next month, and made a few further updates to the Anthology of 16th and Early 17th Century Scots Poetry. I also updated the layout of the sparklines in entry pages on our test interface of the Dictionary of the Scots Language as someone had spotted a slight issue when viewing entries on Mobile devices.

The bulk of my week was split between writing the article on the development of the Books and Borrowing project and implementing the interactive map of Burns correspondence. I completed my sections for the article and sent it on to Katie for feedback on Wednesday. Katie then got back to me with some further suggestions on Friday and I’ll hopefully finish a complete first draft early next week. I spent at least two full days on this task this week, but there’s not really much more I can say about it here.

I devoted most of Thursday and Friday to the Burns correspondence map, which I think is coming along very nicely now. Previously I’d suggested that the correspondence category system was rather unwieldy (featuring around 50 categories) and that it might be better to amalgamate some categories and add in groupings to these categories. I’ve now implemented the two-tier category system, assigning a ‘parent’ category to all categories in the system. This required me to update the database structure to add a new parent category ID. I also updated the CMS to take parent categories into consideration: when adding or editing a category the parents now appear in a drop-down list and the ‘browse categories’ page now features the parent category as a column in the table.

However, I spent most of my time developing the front-end. A couple of minor things to start with: Firstly, the ‘attribution’ text in the top right was a bit long on mobile devices so I’ve replaced this with a shorter link that opens a popup with more complete information. Secondly, the ‘reset map’ option on the ‘Home’ tab now works, and does what you might expect.

When a user selects a location on the map the information in the ‘Correspondence’ tab is now more complete, as the screenshot below demonstrates. Previously only the date was displayed but now each correspondence features a ‘From’ and ‘To’ section with a little envelope and arrow icon in between. The name, dates and location of the sender and recipient feature in these sections. I also added a ‘Highlight’ button to the top-right of the correspondence area. Pressing on this gives the selected record a yellow background and more importantly highlights the locations and the joining line in yellow on the map. It also zooms and pans the map so both locations are visible, but unfortunately this doesn’t take the presence of the menu into consideration so you’ll either have to manually move the map or minimise the menu to see things properly. The yellow is also a little indistinct and I might see about changing this. It can also get lost in the mass of red lines too, even though I’ve set the code to bring the yellow line to the front. You can highlight any number of records at a time in this way. I’ll need to do some further testing, though, as I’ve spotted some instances where the map data isn’t highlighting when it should.

I also added a count of the number of correspondence at the selected location that appears above the list of records as I figured this might be helpful. Previously I had been considering adding all information about the correspondents to the records (with an option to switch from a ‘compact’ to ‘full’ view) but I’ve realised that this would mean repeating a huge amount of data (e.g. having all of the biographical data for Burns listed over and over again). I’ve decided instead to have the correspondents’ names as links. Pressing on a name opens up a popup with the full biographical information in it, as you can see in the following screenshot:

I think this works much better. All available correspondent information is listed (e.g. names, dates, gender, biography, image, links) plus a count of the number of times the person appears as a sender and a recipient as I figured this would be useful.

The last thing I did this week was to update the API to ensure category data is published, and I added this information to the ‘Correspondence’ tab for each record, underneath the ‘From’ and ‘To’ sections. This lists the parent and child categories. If multiple child categories are included for one parent the parent only appears once rather than each time.

Next week I’ll move onto the implementing the filters. This will allow users to limit the data on the map (and in the correspondence tab) to various filters in combination, e.g. people, genders, dates, categories. Once this is in place I’ll still need to develop the interactive timeline feature and also add options to cite / bookmark specific views and options to download data as CSV. So lots still to do.