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

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

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 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

The Berwickshire Place-Name Resource

The resource includes historical research for all Berwickshire place-names on the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 Landranger map, including more than 1,600 place-names and 7,000 historical forms presented via a series of interactive maps. Find out more

The Historical Thesaurus of English

The University of Glasgow’s Historical Thesaurus of English is a unique resource charting the development of meaning in the huge and varied vocabulary of English. It consists of almost every recorded word in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, all arranged into detailed hierarchies of meaning. 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 It replicates Goldsworthy's Slide Cabinet Index, and includes previously unpublished material from Goldsworthy's Sketchbook Diaries.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

Interactive Map of Burns Suppers Worldwide

Featuring more than 1000 Burns Suppers across all 7 continents and in 75 countries around the world, this resource seeks to record, illustrate, and offer new insights into the ways in which the tradition of the Burns Supper continues to be maintained, adapted and reimagined in the 21^st century. Find out more

TheGlasgowStory

As told by some of Scotland's best writers, and illustrated with thousands of images from the collections of the city's world-famous libraries, museums and universities. From football to fashions, Auchenshuggle to Yoker, you'll find it all here. 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

Week Beginning 14th April 2025

Posted on22nd April 202522nd April 2025Authorbaitken

This was a four-day week as Friday was Good Friday. My biggest task of the week was to finally launch the new version of the DSL website that I’d been working on for at least 18 months now. Although this version does not look massively different to the previous version, there are a lot of changes under the bonnet. As well as incorporating updated data, this version features an entirely new search facility that routes all searches through the Solr indexes. Quotation searches now allow users to filter their search by date of quotation and both search results and dictionary entry pages now feature ‘sparklines’ (which are not really sparklines but mini-bar chart) showing the periods of attestation, as you can see here: https://dsl.ac.uk/results/dreich.

I began the process of making the new version live on Monday, copying the new version of the online database across from our test server. On Tuesday I completed the process and by Tuesday afternoon the new version was in place. The process all went very smoothly, but there were some tweaks that needed to be made after the new version went live. The editors had noticed that there were some occurrences where the entry XML had included self-closing empty bold and italic tags (e.g. <b/> and </i>). These are not valid in HTML and browsers interpret them as being opening tags with no closing tags, meaning when the pages are rendered all text from that point onwards is displayed as bold or italic. The editors realised there were about 40 entries that featured such tags, and I had to manually fix them in our online systems, while the editors made the updates within their editing system.

Also this week I worked on a final version of our ‘Speak for Yersel’ abstract for the DH2025 conference in Lisbon. I’m still hoping to source some higher resolution images for the abstract so I haven’t submitted it yet, but other than that it’s pretty much ready to go, which is good as it has to be submitted by the end of the month.

I also made some updates to the HiMuJe Malabar website (https://himuje-malabar.glasgow.ac.uk/) for Ophira Gamliel and our German co-I Innes Weinrich, including updating the footer to add in a further institution and giving advice on editing WordPress pages to a new project RA.

Finally, I spent some further time considering the new versioning system for the Books and Borrowing data, which involved discussing the possibilities with the team and making further plans for the implementation of the feature. It now looks like the team will require the full-on versioning system that I wrote a specification document for last week rather than the simpler, easier and quicker approach I’d also suggested. This will mean pulling every part of the existing Books and Borrowing system to bits and implementing major changes. It’s going to be pretty heavy going, but hopefully it will be worth it. I still need to hear back from the team about how they would prefer the front-end to be updated, and it’s likely that I will start on this major update over the summer.