The team meeting for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language took place in Edinburgh this week, and I attended on Wednesday.  At the meeting I led a session where I demonstrated the potential new interface I’d developed for the DSL website last summer.  I gave a walkthrough of all of the mock-up pages I’d created, such as the homepage, the search results and the entry page, demonstrating the interface on both desktop and mobile devices.  I can’t really say too much about the interface at this stage, or post any screenshots, but the demonstration was very well received by the team and on the whole they are keen to take it forwards.  We spent an hour or so discussing the interface and there were a number of helpful suggestions and new ideas proposed, and I’ll definitely take these into consideration.  There was some talk of launching the new interface next year, so sometime this year (possibly in the summer) I’m intending to replace the interface for our test version of the DSL website with the new interface.  This will involve creating a WordPress theme from the interface, ensuring it is fully integrated with the WordPress platform and also connecting the interface to the DSL’s API in order to pull in real data rather than displaying static mock-ups.  It’s a task that will likely take a few weeks to fully sort out, but once it’s done then the team can fully test out the interface and give further feedback.  I spent some time before the meeting preparing for my session and I also needed to fix a couple of issues with the mock-ups that I’d spotted – for example the tooltips were not triggering on touchscreens.

Also this week I learnt that our paper about Speak For Yersel that I submitted to DH2025 had been accepted, and I had an email conversation with Jennifer Smith about conference arrangements and the presentation.  I also spoke to people at The National Archives about the transferral of the OHOS domain to TNA and updated a few St Andrews records in the Books and Borrowing website whose URLs couldn’t be fixed in the batch update I executed last week.  Someone at St Andrews library made some very helpful suggestions for the books and I manually updated them.  I also heard this week that the Books and Borrowing resource has won the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies’ 2025 digital prize, which is fantastic news.

I spent the rest of my week planning and developing a new search option for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary.  The editor, Geert, wanted a new advanced search facility that would enable users to select one or more cognate dictionaries and then search for a headword found in these dictionaries, returning a list of all AND entries that feature cognate references that match the criteria.  The cognate references are found in the grey box towards the top of every AND entry, for example on this page: https://anglo-norman.net/entry/noble.  There are ten cognate dictionaries (e.g. OED, DEAF) and the forms of the headword as found in these dictionaries are listed.  It is these forms that the new search will target.

I wrote an initial specification for the new feature, the data structures that would be required and the stages that would need to be followed to generate the necessary data and shared it with Geert.  After several email exchanges I wrote a second version of the document and then began work implementing the feature.  The biggest issue will be processing the cognate reference forms, as these will need to be split up in various different ways.  For some dictionaries there are headwords and also subheadwords in brackets.  Other dictionaries use brackets to denote variant forms, sometimes without supplying a closing bracket.  In other cases slashes are used to indicate separate headwords and then there are the issues of parts of speech and numerals appearing at the end of forms.

My first job was to write a script that would go through all active main AND entries and extract all of the cognate reference forms.  In doing so I discovered that there are 634 such entries that don’t include the cognate reference section, and I sent the list to Geert for him to investigate.  I also generated a spreadsheet containing every cognate reference for every entry, which was useful for identifying all of the variety contained in the fields.  I then began writing a script that would generate individual search forms for each cognate reference, generating alternative spellings based on brackets, for example.  By the end of the week I was still in the middle of this and I’ll continue with it next week.