Things are looking promising for the hosting of the 18th Century Playbills project, following some email discussions towards the end of last week and a Teams call I had with Andrew Nicolson from IT Services and Luca on Monday this week. The project will require a lot of storage space (hundreds of gigabytes) and a IIIF server and it now looks like these will be available to us. It’s likely that we will have access to a Cantaloupe IIIF server that will be centrally hosted and connected to storage for our images, which will be ideal for us.
Other than making these arrangements, I spent most of the beginning of the week testing the new interface for the Berwickshire place-names resource and fixing issues that arose. This included updating the way in which map markers are coloured when categorised by element language as previously there were too many combinations for the available colours. I’ve updated the colour schemes to use different shades for specific languages. For example, all SSE categories are shades of blue, all Gaelic categories are shades of purple. It can be difficult to differentiate the shades due to the large number of categories, but you can turn a layer on or off using the legend to quickly figure out which markers belong to which group. I’ve also ensured the ‘loading’ spinner gets displayed when the quick search is reset, as this loads in the full dataset, which takes a bit of time, and without displaying the spinner it looked like the map had broken. I’ve applied this to the other place-name maps too. I made many more minor tweaks and updates to all of the resources during my period of testing. I’m still not altogether happy with how long it takes to load the default view of the data (i.e. all place-names), which can take several seconds. Next week I may investigate how I can speed up this process, but other than this (and ensuring redirects from pages of the old resource are in place) I am ready to launch the new resource, and have sent the URL to project PI Carole Hough for feedback. Hopefully we’ll be able to launch the new resource in the coming weeks.
On Thursday this week I was due to lead a session at the DSL’s annual staff meeting about the new interface mockups I’d created for the site a few months ago. I therefore spent some time on Wednesday refamiliarising myself with the mockups and why I’d taken particular approaches. I then created a runthrough of the mockups and practised going through it a few times. However, on Wednesday evening I was informed that the meeting had been cancelled due to the storm that was due to hit Scotland on Friday morning (many attendees at the meeting were due to travel home on the Friday). This was a shame, but for the best and I hope we can rearrange the meeting for another time.
Instead of attending the DSL meeting on Thursday I spent part of the day in discussions to ascertain the status of Transkribus at Glasgow. I’m involved in a project with Joanna Kopaczyk that’s due to start soon and will be digitising and extracting text from the original materials compiled for the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue. Joanna and I had both heard (from different people) that Glasgow has an institutional license for Transkribus, but when investigating this I’ve been unable to find any details of such a license. This is concerning as the project was funded on the assumption that such an agreement was in place, and if we have to pay per page we’re potentially going to run into difficulties. This is especially true as in the past month Transkribus has revised their payment plans, and have halved the number of pages that can be processed for free each month, from 100 to 50. Joanna is going to investigate this further and hopefully some further details can be found.
I spent the rest of the week working for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, replacing Twitter/X with BlueSky on the website and updating the entry page to ensure more of the cognate references (the references to similar entries in other resources) actually link through to online resources. I created a test version of the entry page so nothing is live yet, but I’ve managed to add in links to Gdf, GdfC, DEAF and DMLBS.
This has involved rewriting sections of the XSLT script that processes entries for display and the JavaScript that reworks the links once the entry has been loaded into the browser. The XSLT was previously set to only process cogrefs that had their ‘linkable’ attribute set to ‘yes’ in the XML, e.g.
<FEW_refs siglum="FEW" linkable="yes"> <link_form>discipulus</link_form><link_loc>3,92a</link_loc> </FEW_refs>
I’ve had to change this to ensure the previously unlinked cogrefs do now get linked, e.g.
<Gdf_refs siglum="Gdf" linkable="no"> <link_form>disciple</link_form><link_loc>2,718a</link_loc> </Gdf_refs>
The XSLT now no longer looks at the ‘linkable’ attribute at all, as otherwise we’d have to update every entry XML file to set linkable to ‘yes’ for every cogref like the one above. Instead the XSLT will now attempt to add in a link for all cogrefs other than ‘TL’ (the only one that is not found online), or will display ‘∅’ if there is no matching cogref entry. It is slightly unsatisfying to have an attribute that no longer gets used and we should perhaps consider doing something about this, but the issue doesn’t have a bearing on how the site functions.
For Gdf the links use the numerals where possible, which means removing non-numeric characters (e.g. ‘a’ from 718a) and subtracting one from the page number. E.g. ‘Gdf: 2,718a’ gives the link https://micmap.org/dicfro/next/dictionnaire-godefroy/717/2. Where it’s not possible to use the ‘location’ like this then the headword is used, stripped of any text in brackets. GdfC is handled in the same way as Gdf, but the page number doesn’t need altered.
For DEAF headword text is used in the link. If there is any text in brackets this is extracted and placed after a hash, for example https://deaf.hadw-bw.de/lemme/paele#paelete. Any spaces in the headword are removed so that numerals work (e.g. https://deaf.hadw-bw.de/lemme/nef2). If there are any DEAF headwords that legitimately have spaces we’ll need to consider how to deal with these.
For DMLBS the headword stripped of any bracketted text is used. Unfortunately it’s not possible (as far as I can tell) to link specifically to the DMLBS tab on the Logeion website as their website has no way to reference a specific tab, which is a shame.
Once the AND editor Geert gets back to me I’ll be able to go live with this update, which I’m sure will be very useful to a lot of users.