I spent a lot of this week working for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, planning and preparing for some major upcoming changes.  Last week I began writing a specification document for a new region / dialect areas interactive map and I completed this on Monday, sending it out to members of the team for feedback and then replying to comments throughout the rest of the week.  I then moved on to researching the new XML structure the DSL are using for entries.  There have been some major updates to the structure that have been implemented in the DSL’s editing system and will require significant changes to the front-end, the search facilities and the scripts used to process entry XML files after their export from the editing system.

Over the course of the week I wrote a document that detailed all of the changes that will need to be made to the various scripts, databases, indexes and systems to incorporate the changes to the XML structure.  I can’t go into too much detail about the new structure or the changes here, other than to say that the structural changes are significant.  By Friday I had finished going through all of my systems and the information provided to me regarding the new structure, and had documented all of the updates that would be required.  However, during the process a number of questions arose that will need further clarification from the team, and we’ve arranged to meet to discuss things before I begin implementing the updates.  Unfortunately due to members of the team being on holiday this likely won’t happen until later in September, but I have plenty of other things to focus on, both for DSL and for other projects, in the meantime.

Also this week I attended online meetings with two researchers who are in the planning stages for new projects.  I’d had email conversations with both of them last week, and had arrange online meetings with them this week.  The first was with Emanuele Scieri, who works in Theology, and we had a good discussion about his project and the technical aspects it might involve.  The second was with Mícheál Ó Mainnín, a place-names scholar at Queen’s University Belfast who is hoping to adapt the place-names system I’ve developed for a new area, and again this was a great meeting and we had some good discussions.  I can’t say much more about the projects at this stage, but will need to see how things go.

Other than the above, this week I had an email conversation with Eleanor Lawson about a new project, I made some further tweaks to the VARICS lookup tool, I gave some advice to Robert Davies in the College of Social Sciences regarding interactive maps, and I had an email conversation with Simon Taylor about the updates I’m making to the Place-names of Fife, and I devotes some time on Friday to continuing with the migration of the Fife data to the more standardised structure used by the other place-names resources.  I’ve now migrated the main place records, the information about map sheets, classification codes and parishes, although the latter still need parish boundaries to be added.  I also began looking at historical forms, but the sources are going to need some significant work, as the source titles and references (e.g. page numbers) are stored in a single field and will need to be split up, which is going to take some processing.