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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

Week Beginning 13th January 2025

Posted on20th January 202522nd January 2025Authorbaitken

During last week’s advisory board meeting for the Iona project someone mentioned search engine optimisation and how the Iona site (https://iona-placenames.glasgow.ac.uk/) is generally well situated in search results. This got me thinking of how our new map-based interface would be indexed by web crawlers. While the map interface is great for humans, it will make all of the data much harder for web crawlers to index. With the older style of place-name interface all of the data was easily findable in text form on web pages, but with everything now appearing within the map interface services like Google are much less likely to be able to index our data as it’s buried in pop-ups and other JavaScript elements.

To mitigate this, I decided to create a new, purely text-based alphabetical browse of place-names. This links through to the full records on the map, but more importantly for search engines, it includes the full text of fields like the description and translation, which should be straightforward for web crawlers to find and index. When we go live with the map we’ll just need to add a link to this page to the site menu too. Here’s a screenshot of the new page:

With the new page in place (but not yet live) I then returned to the other place-name sites that I’ve also developed the new map interface for (Ayrshire, Kirkcudbrightshire and Nairnshire) to add the new textual browse page to them too. I also took the opportunity to apply some recent updates to the maps for these resources, such as adding in the new ‘help and about’ pop-up.

I then moved onto setting up the new map interface for the Berwickshire project. This was the first large-scale place-names project I was involved with, and it launched back in 2018. Thankfully it didn’t prove too tricky to set up the new interface for the project, as all subsequent place-names resources are based on the same architecture as this site. I did need to set up a new version of the API, and the new map-based resource currently doesn’t have the map icons of the existing Berwickshire map, as we dropped these from all subsequent projects. There is also an issue when categorising the map markers for the full dataset by element language, as there are so many combinations of elements and not enough colours to apply to these. I’ll need to further investigate this, but on the whole the new interface is working pretty well, and also incorporates the LiDAR data, as the following screenshot demonstrates:

On Thursday I had a meeting with Matthew Creasy to discuss a potential new project about the poems of Mallarmé. We had a good chat and afterwards I spent quite a bit of time writing up my notes and thinking about how the resource would work. I sent the resulting document to Matthew and I’ll just need to see whether anything comes of this.

This took up quite a bit of time on Friday, and I spent the remainder in discussions with various people to get the required space for Deven Parker’s 18^th century playbills project. It’s looking like this might be possible now and I’ll be following this up next week.