For the Anglo-Norman Dictionary this week I made a couple of major updates to the data.  Firstly, a researcher had gone through the whole of ‘D’ to compile links from each entry to the DEAF dictionary.   This took the form of a spreadsheet and I adapted the script I’d previously written to deal with DEAF links in order to work with this new data.  The script updated the XML of each entry so I made sure I backed up the data first, and ran everything on a test version prior to updating the live site, but thankfully all went smoothly and entries such as https://anglo-norman.net/entry/dubbeour now have links out to the DEAF.

The second major update was a new batch of entries and major revisions of existing entries that the team have been working on over the past few months.  This covers all of ‘W’ plus may other entries across the entire dictionary.  As with previous updates, I ran and tested everything locally before updating the live site, as the first step in such an update is to delete the entirety of the letter that’s being updated.  After running everything on my laptop and testing things out I spotted a couple of issues with the entries and in discussion with the editor Geert we managed to sort them out.  In total the update added or edited 1918 entries, of which 1161 were ‘main’ (rather than cross-reference) entries.  These included 1245 main senses, 34 subsenses, 77 locutions, 41 locution senses, 1 locution subsense and 2460 citations.

Also during this process we spotted that cross references were not being listed properly in the dictionary’s content management system.  The code that regenerates the cross references after changes are made to the data wasn’t specifically identifying and targeting the ‘active’ versions of entries and sometimes the links that were stored were to inactive versions, which then weren’t displaying, as the code for displaying them was specifying active records only.  However, I updated the code and regenerated the cross references so they all now appear.

Also this week the editor Karen spotted that links to the FEW dictionary from commentaries weren’t working and I updated the code to fix this.  I also spotted that the dictionary browse feature on the entry page wasn’t working when entries featured upper case letters.  I tried a few approaches to sorting this, but the ‘slug’ field in the database needs to be case sensitive as this is the only way to make the field accent sensitive too, which is needed as we have slugs for different entries that are identical other than for an accent.  I did try swapping the field the browse targets from the slug to the lemma, but this introduced further issues because the lemma can include brackets, plus the ‘next’ and ‘previous’ links in the browse rely on the slug field.  I’m going to have to return to this next week.

Also this week I created a mini-site for Alan Riach’s media.  This involved extracting audio and video files from CDs and DVDs, which was slightly time consuming.  The DVDs were rather tricky to extract as they were in multiple parts that then needed joined together.  Also, one of the DVDs was corrupted and I was only able to extract half of it.  I also had to migrate transcriptions of four hour-long audio files from Word to HTML and of course create the site structure and design.  The site is password protected and is intended for students and educational use only but here is a screenshot:

Also this week I addressed some issues that had been uncovered whilst testing the advanced search facilities of the test version of the Dictionaries of the Scots Language that is set up with the latest version of the data.  The first issue was that in bibliography searches some entries appear twice in the drop-down list.  This was happening because entries can have both long and short titles and authors and the drop-down list was accommodating both.  I’ve updated this so that just the author and title that are picked as the ‘display’ versions during import are now displayed, so there are no more duplicates.  However, this does mean it’s not always clear why an entry appears in the list.  For example, if you select ‘author’ and enter ‘ham’ you’ll see ‘Belhaven, J. H.’ and it’s not until you click through that you can see that ‘Ham’ comes from ‘Hamilton’.

The second issue, also relating to the bibliographies was that some items were not being found in the search.  This was because the import script was only picking out titles and authors for bibs that had an ‘oldid’.  Bibs that didn’t have these were still being processed and display titles and authors were being stored, but as no additional titles and authors were being extracted the searches therefore weren’t working.  This has now been sorted – the display titles and authors are also now being searched in addition to the other titles and authors.

Whilst testing this out I also discovered that selecting items from the drop-down list that featured apostrophes and colons broke the search and led to an empty search results page.  For example a title search for ‘cottager’ and then selecting the “cottager’s daughter” item.  This is still broken on the live site, but is now fixed on the test site.

Also this week I liaised with our IT Services and technical people at The National Archives to arrange for the OHOS domain to be transferred to the TNA.  I also responded to a query about the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England, had an email conversation with Matthew Creasy about his Mallarmé project  and spent some time making updates to the Iona map interface following our team meeting last week.

I think I’ve covered everything that was raised at the meeting.  I created a space for each categorisation at the top of the legend with some placeholder text for now (e.g. ‘Info about language classification’). For now when you hide the legend the description remains visible, as I figured it might be useful to know what the markers represent, but I can make this hide along with everything else.  I’ve also updated the altitude classification to 20m increments and added in language tooltips wherever languages appear (e.g. in the small popup and the full record).  Parts of speech in the full record also now have tooltips, although I’m afraid there are a few that I can’t put a name to and there are others I may have got wrong, so these may need further work.  I updated the satellite views so that they now feature markers with a white border. And I’ve fixed issue with the top legend tick box ending up unticked in Chrome.  In addition, all language combinations in the legend for language now feature tooltips (if they are abbreviated).  I’ve applied most of these updates to the other place-names resources too.  I still have to add in the tooltips (points 3 and 4) to the other sites, but I will do so next week.