Last week I was sent the latest dataset from the Dictionaries of the Scots Language’s editing system that included fixes to the way citation dates were generated and the reinstatement of the bibliographical data structure that my scripts were written to work with.  On Monday I ran this updated dataset through my import scripts running on an instance of the DSL site hosted on my laptop and all went very smoothly.

The new bibliographical data contains 7045 entries (4794 SND, 2251 DOST), up from 6108 in the live data (4099 SND, 2009 DOST).  The new data features 5348 authors, down from 5434, and 9791 titles, down from 9908.

When I processed the previously exported dataset a couple of weeks ago I spotted that there had been an issue with the generation of the citation date elements during the export process, which meant that almost 29,000 entry citations featured no date field.  Thankfully this issue has been successfully resolved in the latest export and the number of citations featuring no dates had dropped dramatically to just 56.

With both the export from the DSL’s editing system and the import of the data into the website system now working smoothly we are in a position to roll out the update on the live DSL site.  The DSL team still have other things to do before this happens, however, and we’re likely to not go live with the update until the new year.

I spent a large part of the week continuing to work on the interactive map of the correspondence of Robert Burns, and I have now fully completed a first version of the resource.  Last week I worked on facilities to enable specific views of the map to be bookmarked, shared and cited by adding information about the view to the hash in the page URL.  This week I completed work on this by enabling a specific timeline entry to be shared.  I was worried that this would be rather tricky to implement as the timeline data is loaded in sequentially each time the user chooses to proceed to the next item and initially I had been intending on loading all correspondence for prior timeline items when a specific item was loaded from a URL.  Instead I decided to not feature the earlier data on the map until the user navigates back through the items, much in the same way as later timeline items are added.  This was simpler to implement than populating the map with every earlier item, and the timeline is primarily meant to be accessed using the ‘previous’ and ‘next’ buttons rather than by manually moving about the map so I didn’t think this was a huge issue.

Whilst using the timeline feature I realised that it was somewhat difficult to return to the full map data once the timeline tab has been pressed on.  When a user enters the timeline the map is cleared of data and each correspondence is then added to the map in date order as the user navigates through the timeline items.  But pressing on another menu tab leaves the contents of the map at the point at which the user left the timeline, meaning not all data is necessarily visible.  The only way to return the full dataset to the map is to reset it or re-apply a filter, which is not very intuitive.  I therefore added an ‘Exit timeline’ button to the timeline view that when pressed on reinstates the full dataset that matches the user’s chosen filters and returns the user to the ‘Filter’ tab.  You can see this new button in the following screenshot:

Also visible in the above screenshot is the new ‘Cite’ button, which I added to each menu tab and also to the bibliography popup.  When pressed on this opens up a popup with various citation styles and the text of the citation varies depending on what you’re viewing, as the screenshot below demonstrates (with the URL of the resource redacted as it’s not ready to launch yet).  The screenshot shows that the view of the map if filtered to only show ‘historians’, the map uses the ‘historical’ base map and the ‘filter’ tab is visible.

Citations of the bibliographies are handled slightly differently as the biography is already in a popup.  For this reason when you press on the ‘cite’ link the existing popup content is replaced with the ‘cite’ options, with a link back to the biography rather than opening a further popup.  I also implemented a URL shortener that I developed for another project, which essentially stores a short code in the database to represent the full URL.  The short code is then used in the citation, and can be shared.  When the short code is passed the full URL is retrieved and the relevant view and data are loaded.

I then updated the filters tab to include includes options to view the data in a table and download the data as a CSV, as the following screenshot demonstrates:

Again I was thankfully able to adapt existing code from previous projects to implement these options, although I did still have to spend some time customising things to ensure that the data was properly formatted in the CSV and the in-page table view.  I think that is now everything in place and it’s now time for others to test out the resource and give me some feedback.  I’m sure there will be at least some things that will need tweaked, or some bugs that crop up.

Also this week I had an email conversation about the hosting arrangements for the OHOS project and also set up a new user for the project’s website.  Eleanor Lawson sent me some further updates to the STAR website, consisting of some improved animation videos and I ensured the older versions were successfully replaced with the new ones.  I also had a chat with Jennifer Smith about the DH2025 conference and whether we should write a paper about the new Speak For Yersel regions for it.  I’ll need to give this some further thought next week.