Much of Monday morning this week was spent working with Andrew McHugh and Luca Guariento to figure out why a large number of our externally hosted websites were displaying nothing but server errors.  This took some time to investigate and it turned out that one node was being affected, and this was apparently being caused by over-enthusiastic web crawlers targeting one script repeatedly, resulting in CPU resources getting used up.  Once identified, we limited access to the script and everything went back to normal.

I spent a lot of this week continuing with the cognate reference updates for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary.  Cognate references are links from AND entries to related entries in other dictionaries and we’re increasing the range of dictionaries that we provide active links to, as opposed to providing plain text references to.  As part of this I needed to write a script to update the references to DEAF (Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français) that were embedded in our entries.  Last week I wrote a script that identified issues with DEAF references involving sub-headwords in brackets in 295 AND entries and we needed to update the structure of these as discussed last week.  The editor Geert sent me an edited version of the spreadsheet that contained the forms that should be included and I wrote a script to extract these, generate the required XML and then find and replace the relevant section of the XML in the live entries.  This obviously required quite a lot of testing before I ran it on the live data, but I’d completed and fully tested the script by the end of Tuesday and I successfully ran it on Wednesday morning.

At this point the increased selection of cognate references that we link to were still only available on a test page rather than the live site.  I then moved onto updating the layout of the section in the entry page to make it easier to use.  Previously the section looked something like this:

It was quite difficult to understand the section:  There was no explanation as to what the section was, or what acronyms like ‘FEW’ actually meant.  It was also difficult to tell where one cognate reference section ended and the next began.  Geert asked me to come up with some new ideas for the section and I spent a bit of time working on a few mock-ups.  We finally agreed on a new version that gets rid of the square brackets around the entire section and divides the individual dictionaries into inline-block elements that have a border and a light grey background, thus making it quicker and easier to identify the different dictionaries.  I also swapped the order of the headwords and the reference numbers and make all text normal weight.  Finally, I added in an ’info’ icon to the top-right that when pressed on opens up a popup with some explanatory text about the section and the dictionaries that are referenced.  Here’s how the new section looks:

We went live with this new layout on Friday afternoon and so far it has been very well received.  Also for the AND this week I updated the cognate references that could be actively linked to from the entry commentaries to bring these into line with the new cognate reference section.

Also this week I worked on the layout for a new ‘Scots Word of the Week’ page with William Ashford of the Dictionaries of the Scots Language.  After a number of experiments I created a layout that suited, and the page is now live: https://dsl.ac.uk/scots-word-of-the-week/.  I also fixed an issue with embedded videos being too large for mobile devices on the site and responded to a query from Ann Ferguson about the data import workflow and how URLs are generated.

I also spent some time updating the ‘lookup’ feature for the VARICS project, based on feedback that I’d been sent last week.  I added in the proper measure labels and I updated the system so that each measure has a ‘sex’ column.  The option to select a sex is only displayed when this is set to ‘Yes’.  For our working measures (the maximum phonation ones in the ‘Phonation’ menu) sex is now set to ‘No’, but the other measures still have it set to ‘Yes’.  This can easily be updated as more real data becomes available.  I also replaced the ‘age’ input with a drop-down list of options and have dropped the ‘red’ rating for now, as suggested by the team.  I also removed the ‘alternative view’ that featured all three traffic lights, plus the ‘additional information’ section and updated the output text as requested and limited the display of all numbers to 2 decimal places.

I’ve also spent a bit of time trying to find alternative ‘cartoon/clipart’ traffic light images.  Finding ones that are both free to use and have a suitable license has proved to be quite a challenge.  Eventually I thought I’d give AI tools a try, and decided to try Microsoft’s image creator (https://designer.microsoft.com/image-creator) as I was already signed into my Microsoft account.  The results were somewhat mixed and some rather odd images were created – e.g. traffic lights with four lights, traffic lights with odd symbols on them.  Attempting to specify a UK style traffic light gave an image that featured the weirdest attempt at the Union Jack I’ve ever seen.  It also totally ignored my request for the traffic light to be against a white background.  Here’s a screenshot of the output:

However, I managed to pick out one generated image I thought I could use and I’ve split it up into individual images.  I’ve now replaced the images in the lookup with these ones.  This is by no means the final version and it’s likely that we’ll change the image again before the feature is completed, but here is now it currently looks:

I’d received some helpful feedback from Eila Williamson of the Berwickshire Place-names project regarding the new map interface I’ve been developing and made some tweaks to the interface based on this.  Eila also spotted that there is an issue with the element language part of the advanced search facility.  At the moment selecting an element language in the form simply limits the choices that then appear in the ‘Element’ field to your chosen language – e.g. select ‘Old English’ and type in ‘tu’ and only ‘tūn (OE)’ appears.  It doesn’t currently let you select an element language and then view all place-names containing it.  I’m afraid this is an oversight on my part, as the existing advanced search does indeed let you do this.  It’s going to be a pretty major job to update the search to allow this, but it’s something that will need addressed, not just on the Berwickshire site but in all of the place-names sites.  I had hoped to have the time to tackle the issue this week but I ran out of time.

Also this week I had an email conversation with Joanna Kopaczyk about her DOST digitisation project that will be commencing next week, I attended a meeting about the teaching of Digital Humanities at Glasgow, I responded to a query from The National Archives about the hosting of the OHOS project, I did a bit of research into some old files that Jean Anderson contacted me about and I attended a meeting in Special Collections for Matthew Creasy’s Mallarmé project.