Curious Travellers

The project explores Romantic-period accounts of journeys into Wales and Scotland with a focus on the writings of the Flintshire naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), whose published Tours of both countries did so much to awaken public interest in the ‘peripheries’ of Britain. Find out more

Bess of Hardwick's Letters

Bess of Hardwick's Letters brings together, for the first time, the remarkable letters written to and from Bess of Hardwick (c.1521/2 or 1527-1608), one of Elizabethan England's most famous figures. Find out more

Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus

The Metaphor Map of English shows the metaphorical links which have been identified between different areas of meaning. These links can be from the Anglo-Saxon period right up to the present day so the map covers 1300 years of the English language. Find out more

SCOTS: Scottish Corpus Of Texts and Speech

The Scottish Corpora project has created large electronic corpora of written and spoken texts for the languages of Scotland, featuring nearly 4.6 million words of text, with audio recordings to accompany many of the spoken texts. Find out more

Scots Syntax Atlas

The Scots Syntax Atlas presents the results of over 100,000+ acceptability judgments from over 500 speakers on over 250 morphosyntactic phenomena. The Atlas also contains a text-to-sound aligned corpus of spoken data totalling 275 hours and over 3 million words. Find out more

Books and Borrowing: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers, 1750-1830

Books and Borrowing uncovers and reinterprets the history of reading in Scotland in the period 1750 to 1830 through 144,000 borrowing records across 18 libraries. Find out more

Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue

The Digital Catalogue documents, visually and textually, the first ten years of Andy Goldsworthy's ephemeral, outdoor practice. It replicates Goldsworthy's Slide Cabinet Index, and includes previously unpublished material from Goldsworthy's Sketchbook Diaries. Find out more

Mackintosh Architecture: Context, Making and Meaning

The project provides a richly-illustrated Catalogue of all known architectural projects by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, including over 1200 drawings by Mackintosh and the practice, analytical and contextual essays, a timeline and glossary. Find out more

Consultation Letters of Dr William Cullen (1710-1790) at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

A publicly accessible, online scholarly edition of one of the most important archives of eighteenth-century medical "consultation letters", containing more than 20,000 digitised pages. Find out more

People of Medieval Scotland 1093-1371

A database of all known people of Scotland between 1093 and 1314 mentioned in over 8600 contemporary documents. It is also being extended to 1371 to include all those lands, peoples and relationships mentioned in royal charters between 1314 and 1371. Find out more

Week Beginning 7th April 2025

Posted on14th April 202514th April 2025Authorbaitken

This was a two-day week for me, as I had taken Monday to Wednesday off as annual leave. I spent the majority of this time considering a pretty major update to the Books and Borrowing system and writing a specification document for the update that was almost 2,500 words long. As I briefly touched upon last week, the project is intending to add a significant amount of new data to the resource, but they need a means of tracking these updates.

These further additions may include everything from new registers, register pages, book records at all four levels, authors, borrowers and borrowing records. Although it is unlikely that new libraries will be added, this possibility should also be taken into consideration. The team need to differentiate between the original version of the data that was published at the end of the project and subsequent additions in order to track future updates and to ensure the original data can be queried when writing the monograph. The project’s systems will therefore need to be updated to incorporate a versioning mechanism.

This means that every aspect of the project’s systems will need to be updated, both to ensure version information is stored when records are created and that different versions of the data can be queried in the front-end. Essentially, this means updating the database, the content management system, the API, the scripts used to generate Solr data and other caches, the Solr index itself and the front-end. It took a long time to think through all of the aspects that would need updated and write a plan for how these should be updated. In terms of the front-end there are several possible ways in which the update could be implemented, from only updating the search facility (meaning only the search results would differ when a specific version is selected but other parts of the site would only ever use the current data version) to setting a version number that would then be used by the entire site.

I’m not entirely convinced how useful a versioning system will be to users of the site and I’ve also proposed a much simpler solution to the team, which would merely take a snapshot of the data as it currently exists and create a different version of the sit that would query this. It’s up to the team to consider the options now and I’ll see which path we’re going to take when they get back to me.

Also this week I had a discussion with Carole Hough and Critical Studies Admin about Cogtop, one of Carole’s old sites that went offline in 2021. At the time she had thought all necessary content had been migrated to T4, but it turns out only an introduction was, and all other content was still linking to the old site, which has since disappeared. I’m going to try and find a backup of the site to see if it’s possible to rescue the missing content, although I won’t be able to do this until the end of the month, as I’m currently working away from Glasgow.

Finally this week, I responded to a query from the Dictionaries of the Scots Language about how the quick search results are ordered, as they had spotted that this different slightly between the live site and our test site. It took a while to investigate what was causing the difference, but I figured it out in the end.

In the search results of both the live and new sites the main results and the variant results are split, with the main results appearing first and then the variants (with ‘variant of…’ added) after. In the live site the results are ordered by the form, but it’s the headword that gets displayed (which can cause confusion). In the new site the results are ordered by the headword, which makes more sense, as this is what is displayed.

In the live site ‘form’ and ‘variant’ are treated separately. For ‘curcuddoch’, for example, the form that matches the search is <f type=”form”>CARCUDEUGH</f>. As this is a ‘form’ and not a ‘variant’ its headword (which is always the first form in the list) just gets displayed, rather than being replaced by ‘variant of…’. So this item gets added to the main list rather than the variant list, and appears first as the form is first alphabetically.

In our test site, if the form that matches the search is not the same as the headword (which is considered to be the first form in the list) then it is always treated as a variant and the ‘variant of…’ text is prepended to the headword and this appears in the variant section of the results.

Next week we’re planning on going live with the major new update of the DSL and its data that we’ve been working on for at least 18 months now, which is exciting.