I was on holiday last week, although I kept up to date with my emails whilst I was away, so at least I didn’t have a backlog waiting for me when I got back.  I did have quite a lot to do this week, though, and the most pressing was to complete the rollout of the new XML entry structure for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language.  I’d begun this process the week before my holiday, but had run into difficulties getting the Solr indexes set up on the server, and while I attempted to resolve this with Andy in IT Services we ran into difficulties were were unable to resolve before I headed off.

After further investigation and discussions with Andy this week it turned out that there were two issues. Firstly the ‘conf’ directory for Solr indexes needed to go into a different directory on the server compared to how things work on my laptop, and how things used to work on the server.  Rather than appearing in the index’s own directory, the ‘conf’ directories need to be stored in directories that have the index name within the configsets directory, otherwise the creation of the index fails.  Secondly, when Andy did manage to successfully create the first index the week before last he unfortunately got the name slightly wrong, which neither of us spotted in the rush to get things finished on the Friday afternoon before my holiday.  This then prevented the command to index content from working, as Solr was attempting to post files to an index that didn’t actually exist.

Thankfully these issues have now been sorted, the ‘entries’ and ‘quotations’ indexes now work.  I was then able to update our test website to use the new indexes, meaning the website now includes the display of the new entry structure, data extracted from the new XML structure and also the map popups.  The DSL team can now experiment with all of this and get back to me with any tweaks or updates that they require.

Also for the DSL this week, I dealt with the last item on my list of feedback for the map of regions and dialect areas.  I’d suggested that we should include facilities to cite or share views of the map, and also make use of the URL shortener I’d developed for the place-names resources and this was something the team wanted me to implement.  By the end of the week I’d completed a first version of this and had added it to the map.

Initially I had intended to have a ‘cite’ popup as I use on the place-name resources, but then I thought it would be better to use the same ‘share’ options that we use elsewhere on the DSL site for consistency.  I added the ‘share’ buttons in a row at the bottom of the left-hand menu and got things working with the full page URLs appearing in the ‘share’ output.

However, I ran into something of a brick wall when implementing the URL shortener.  I tried many different approaches to get the shortened URLs to replace the default page URLs in the ‘share’ options but nothing would work.  The reason is that the URL shortener posts data to the server to generate the shortened code and then saves this with the full URL in the database, but despite the ‘share’ plugin allowing custom URLs to be added in, there does not appear to be any way to make its code hang around until my script connects to the server and generates the shortened URL – it just jumps ahead, thinks no custom URL exists and uses the default page URL regardless.

After attempted many different ways to get around this, but failing to find anything that would work, I then decided to revert back to my ‘cite’ popup option, as this would enable me to generate the shortened URL when the popup is opened, meaning it’s ready and waiting when the user clicks the ‘share’ option contained within the popup.  Plus in addition to the ‘share’ options we can also include the citation styles for people who want them.  Thankfully this approach has worked, as the screenshot below demonstrates:

You can see the shortened URL in the ‘cite’ options (redacted as the resource is not yet live), and this shortened version is also used in the ‘Share’ options.  This is still just a first version of the ‘cite / share’ feature, however, and further changes may be required.  For now there is no custom text in the ‘share’ or ‘site’ options describing what the map shows.  It would be quite a lot of work to add this in, so I’ll just see if the DSL team want me to do it.  It would mean that rather than just saying ‘Map of regions and dialect areas’ a citation might say something like ‘Map of the regions of Scotland centred on [lat,lon here] with regions Ayrshire, North Ayrshire and West of Scotland selected’.

Also this week I had a meeting with the HiMuJe Malabar team to discuss the development of the interactive map.  It was a very useful meeting and we have a much clearer idea of how things will develop now, and how the map will relate to the digital edition, which is something that is being managed at a partner institution.  This led on to discussions about issues Ophira was having with displaying the digital edition files in Oxygen on her PC.  The digital edition is one long block of prose and this is causing Oxygen to get rather laggy when editing it in the ‘author’ view.  I asked my colleague Luca to have a look at this, as he has more experience with Oxygen than I do, and he was able to come up with a solution that splits the single XML file into multiple smaller files.  This approach seems to have worked very well, but we need to see what the project partners make of this change before it can be adopted by the project.

I also met with Henry Ivry this week to discuss the development of a new online resource for the Beniba Centre.  We had a good chat about the various options and what might need to be done and Henry is going to get back to me with some further information that I can then use to get things started.  I also made a bit of progress with the place-names of Armagh project with Mícheál Ó Mainnín at Queens University Belfast.  We now have a request submitted for the domain and hosting and hopefully this will all get set up in the next couple of weeks.

I also fixed an issue with the display of an entry in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary.  A malformed <link_loc> was causing issues with the page.  The <link_loc> should have a comma (1,175c), but this was missing.  The JavaScript that processes the references expects to find a comma and when it doesn’t it throws an error, meaning all of the other JavaScript stops working (including the parts that rearrange the author’s initials and numbers).  I offered to update the code to deal with this a little more gracefully, but the editor Geert didn’t think it was an issue that would crop up very often and didn’t think it was worth doing.

Also this week I was contacted by Alison Wiggins to ask me to do some work on her Mary Queen of Scots Letters project, which has lain dormant for several years.  Alison now has some time to work with the data and get things moving again and she had a few questions and requests, which I attended to.