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

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

James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was a major figure in 19th century printmaking and created 490 etchings. Over 9500 impressions of these prints have been located and investigated during the project, which completes a series of catalogues raisonnés of Whistler's oeuvre. 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

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

Seeing speech

The resource provides ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) and lip video of speech, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) video of speech, and 2D midsagittal head animations based on MRI and UTI data. 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

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

Week Beginning 2nd June 2025

Posted on9th June 20259th June 2025Authorbaitken

I made the Iona place-names map resource live this week, in preparation for the official launch on Monday next week. After working on the project on and off for several years it’s great to get the resource out there. It can be accessed here: https://iona-placenames.glasgow.ac.uk/map/.

I spent a lot of my time this week continuing with the development of the versioning system for the Books and Borrowing project. Due to other commitments I didn’t manage to work on this task last week, having completed the updates to the scripts for generating the cached data the week before, so it was good to be able to return to this task and make a bit of progress. This week I focussed on updates to the API, which is a pretty major task as every single database call in more than 5000 lines of code needs to be updated. Before I did so I also had to consider how the user’s selected data version would be passed to the API. Appending it to the end of the existing set of parameters would be messy, as each endpoint would then potentially have the version passed through a different parameter. Instead I decided to that the version should appear at the very start of each endpoint call, before the file type selection. So for example, ‘/api/v2/1/json/libraries’ will retrieve all ‘version 1’ data for the ‘libraries’ endpoint as a JSON file while ‘/api/v2/2/json/libraries’ will retrieve all ‘version 2’ (and version 1) data. In order to ensure older calls that don’t feature the version number continue to work, I set the API to use the ID of the most recent live version of the data if the version number is omitted. Also, the API checks to ensure that any version number passed does actually correspond to a version of the data that is actually live in the system, so the API will never publish data that is still in development.

With this update to the API in place I then needed to work through every database query in every endpoint in order to add in the version limit. In some endpoints this was pretty straightforward to do, but other ones did get rather complicated, involving cached data in new database tables or specific versions of cached JSON files. I didn’t manage to complete the update to the API by the end of the week, but I’m hopeful I’ll be able to do so next week, at which point I aim to add a new version of the API to the live site, in preparation for redeveloping the front-end to work with the versioning system.

On Thursday this week we had the interviews for Ophira Gamliel’s project, and this took up more than half of the day. The interviews all went smoothly and we had a good discussion about potential candidates afterwards.

Also this week I had a chat with Geert, the editor of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, about further updates to the site. We’re intending to add in a part of speech option to the advanced search and we spent some time discussing how this might function. I also gave him so advice on long-term digital preservation, helped him set up a new ‘phase’ and fixed an issue when adding lead editor initials to entries through the dictionary management system.

I also gave some advice to Tony Harris, who is developing a thesaurus system based on my code for the Bilingual Thesaurus, and fixed a couple of issues that Marc had spotted with the unified API version of the Historical Thesaurus that I worked on in April. Marc had spotted that some information was missing from the ‘recommended’ category section in the search results. The blank recommended category information was caused by the API correctly returning an empty subcat array for categories that don’t have subcats. Unfortunately the front-end code was checking for the presence of this array when deciding whether the recommended category was a sub or main category, and as the array was present (but empty) for maincats it was treating them as subcats and not displaying the correct details. It took a while to identify the cause of the problem but once I’d done so it was very easy to fix. The second issue that Marc spotted was a URL encoding issue, with both slashes and spaces causing problems. This was something I managed to sort relatively quickly.