Monday this week was a public holiday, and I divided my four working days across several projects. The Iona place-names project is having its official launch on the 9th of June and a fairly last minute request for the map interface was to incorporate ‘thematic maps’ – maps that show a set of markers that share a common theme, such as bird names. Last Friday Sofia sent me the data for two example thematic maps (which I think we’re going to be calling ‘Virtual Trails’ in the public interface) and this week I set about creating the new feature.
When creating a new feature I’d usually create the sections of the CMS for managing the data before updating the front-end but as time is rather tight I thought it best to create the necessary structures in the database, the required updates to the API and work directly on the front-end with the sample data. If there’s time before the launch I’ll create the CMS pages, but if not and we want to add more maps I’ll just have to get the team to send me spreadsheets and I’ll add the data directly to the database. Below is a screenshot showing the new map:
I’m still working on this and there is still quite a bit to do, as adding in the new section and new map type has meant a lot of reworking of existing structures. But as the above screenshot demonstrates, the interface now features a new ‘Virtual Trails’ menu section that when expanded has a placeholder description and a ‘Choose a virtual trail’ button. Pressing on this opens a popup that lists the thematic maps, showing the titles and descriptions. Pressing on a title closes the popup, adds the selected map’s title and description to the left-hand menu and loads the relevant map markers into the map. You can then change the display options (e.g. turning labels to always on, changing the classification or base map) and open the records as you would with any other map.
So that’s the basics in place, but there are still many updates I’ll need to make to the front-end to fully integrate the new feature, including ensuring that the ‘Reset map’ resets the virtual trail menu contents, ensuring citations and bookmarks / sharing URLs work when a trail is selected, ensuring the table view works properly and cancelling out any already active search or browse options when a trail is selected.
Also this week I applied the new updates I’d made last week to the element glossary to the other place-name maps, such as Berwickshire. I also added ‘deselect’ to the legend, as apparently users were unaware that the ‘select all’ option could be used to ‘deselect all’ when unchecked., and I spotted that the Iona full map ‘cite’ option was referencing the Ayr site and fixed that too.
For Speak For Yersel, I spent some time this week creating the slides for my presentation at the Lisbon DH conference, and I have now completed a first version of the slides and script. I’m probably going to have to trim it down a little, though, as when running through it I was taking longer than my allotted ten minutes. I’ll probably have to take out the parts about how the maps were generated, which is a shame as it’s the most DH section, but it’s also not something we discussed in the abstract so if anything needs cut it’s the obvious choice.
On Thursday this week I met with Ophira Gamliel to discuss the interviews for her project, which are taking place next week, and in the afternoon I attended a Modernities Research Cluster event which featured two fascinating speakers. I also fixed an issue with the Thesaurus of Old English for Jane Roberts and fixed a problem with the batch update of citations in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary. This feature of the content management system allows citations across all entries (or selected entries) to be updated simply by editing the citation once. However, there was a problem when adding dates to citations that did not already have them. The script was running into problems when adding a date for an attestation that didn’t already have a <dateInfo> element. I’d included a check for this, but the check was causing a fatal error rather than executing the code that I’d written to deal with such attestations. Thankfully once identified it was relatively easy to fix the problem, and now the batch update system is working perfectly.