My main task for this week was to continue with the creation of a new, unified API for the Historical Thesaurus.  This has been on my ‘to do’ list for a long time, and I began work on it back in February, but was only able to spend a day or so on it.  I was able to devote a few further days to the task this week and have made good progress.  The Historical Thesaurus’s existing website was created over several years, with new features added as and when required, resulting in a structure that’s got a bit messy over time.  For a while now I’ve wanted to bring this into line with the other resources I’ve developed and have a single API through which all data requests are processed.  Back in early February I made a start on this, but only managed to get as far as creating the endpoint to generate a random category.  This week I made a lot more progress, and now have all of the endpoint needed to provide data for the category browser and other parts of the site such as the quizzes.  This has also included the endpoints necessary to generate the timeline visualisations.  I’m also taking the opportunity to tweak the structure of the ancillary pages slightly, stripping out unnecessary function calls.

I still have a fair amount of work ahead of me – the entire search facilities still need to be tackled, as do the endpoints for other visualisations such as the heatmaps and other search options that were developed for the Linguistic DNA project.  As I’m fitting this in around other commitments I’ll just need to see when I’m able to finish work on the API, but I’m pretty pleased with the progress I’ve made this week.

Also this week I spent some further time on the Anglo-Norman Dictionary.  We haven’t gone live with the new cognate reference search yet, but I implemented a new feature for the dictionary’s content management system that the editor Geert suggested recently:  a list of entries that were last updated in each month.  Here’s a screenshot of how this looks:

By default the page lists all of the entries that were last updated in the current month, but you can also select a different month and year to view the entries that were last updated then.  As the note in bold on the page states, this is just a list of when entries were last updated, it’s not a log of every time an entry has been updated.  The table lists some details about each entry and includes a link to view the entry in the CMS.  You can also reorder the table by pressing on the column headings (e.g. ordering by last editor).  Pressing the heading a second time reverses the order.  Hopefully the feature will prove useful to the team.

Also this week I had to fix a couple of issues with the Books and Borrowing website.  On Monday I noticed that the website was offline, and this was caused by the database server failing to restart following an update.  I liaised with Stirling’s IT people to get this working again.  A user of the website had also spotted that the CSV download of the search results was failing to work and I had to spend a bit of time investigating this.  Initially I thought the problem was due to the number of records, but on further investigation it turned out to be caused by the presence of one or more borrowing records that didn’t have an associated book holding record.

For example, on this page https://borrowing.stir.ac.uk/search/p-1/0/0/advanced/brids|4473 the borrowing record with ID 48238 with the transcription ‘Prices Alexero on Sab. Chur: [?]’ doesn’t have an associated book holding.  The CSV output was expecting all borrowing records to have a book holding, and when it reached one that didn’t the script stopped working.  Once I’d identified this I was able to fix the issue and the output now works as expected.

Also this week I liaised with my colleague Luca to get the Helsinki Corpus up and running again.  We host the site, but I’d been alerted to the fact that it was offline on Monday and correctly surmised that it was because our hosting provider had silently upgraded the version of Python that was running on the server, and some aspects of the Helsinki Corpus code were incompatible with the new version.  Thankfully Luca was able to install an alternative to the library that had been deprecated and we got the site back online again.  If I can find the time I’d like to redevelop the Helsinki Corpus site, migrating it to eXist and building a new site around this.  Something to add to my ‘to do’ list.

Also this week the Solr server that powers the Dictionaries of the Scots Language went offline and I needed to speak to our IT people about getting this back online again, which thankfully they were able to do pretty speedily.  I also made a few updates to the help text on the advanced search page of our test site and replaced ‘dates of attestation’ with ‘quotation dates’.  On Friday I received a new batch of data that will hopefully be the last batch that needs processed before the changes made on our test site over the past 18 months can finally go live.  I’ll begin working on this next week.