I spent a lot of my time this week creating a new WordPress theme and complete website interface for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, based on the Bootstrap mock-up I worked on several months ago.  I had demonstrated this mock-up at the DSL’s last face-to-face meeting in February and the plan was for me to develop this into a fully functioning interface before the next meeting, which is taking place in a couple of weeks.  However, since the meeting I was tasked with to major updates to the DSL: implementing the new DSL entry XML structure and developing the interactive maps of regions and dialect areas.  The time I had intended to spend on the new interface was instead devoted to these two new tasks, meaning it is now unlikely that I will have the new interface completed before the next team meeting.

However, having now completed work on the to unanticipated major tasks, I am now at last able to focus on the new interface, which is what I did this week.  I can’t really talk too much about the new interface or show any screenshots at this stage, but this week I set up a version of the site running on my laptop and created a new WordPress theme, initially replicating the current version.  Creating the new interface from my mock-up was slightly tricky to begin with as so much needed to be done before anything could be tested.  I needed to integrate Bootstrap and the JavaScript and CSS I’d created for the mock-up, replace the WordPress-powered site menu with a new one that uses Bootstrap, which requires incorporating a new class into WordPress to fully implement this (https://github.com/wp-bootstrap/wp-bootstrap-navwalker).  I needed to completely replace the header and footer templates, plus the overall page template, I needed to replace the WordPress widgets I’d created for the old theme with new ones for the homepage info boxes, the quick search bar and the introductory text area, and I needed to create a second homepage for ‘Older Scots’ that could also use WordPress widgets.  This, as you can maybe imagine, took a lot of time, but I managed to complete it all by the end of the week.  There is still a huge amount to do, though, such as getting the new theme to actually display any dictionary content, such as the entries and the search results.  I’ll continue with this next week.

Also this week I spent some time preparing some materials for the Speak For Yersel talk I’m giving with Jennifer later in November.  We had intended to meet to go over things this week, but Jennifer needed to push this back to next week.  I also met with Ophira Gamliel to discuss some ideas for a series of online TEI/XML/Oxygen workshops she’s running with colleagues in India, and to discuss support for digital editions in general across the College.  I had another meeting with Jenny Buckley, a researcher in English Literature who is hoping to use AI tools to extract and analyse text from late 18^th century newspapers, and I met with Alan Riach in Scottish Literature to help him extract some sound files that he needs for a conference.

In addition, I had an email conversation with Pauline Mackay and Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman about the interactive map of Burns Suppers, which Cleo is going to be reworking.  I managed to extract the data for the map and its collection of images and send this on to them, and I’ll be meeting with them next week to discuss the redevelopment, which I will be involved with.  I also wrote a section about data management and ethics for a proposal that Garrick Allen is putting together, spoke to Mícheál Ó Mainnín at Queens University Belfast about the place-names of Armagh website I’m putting together for him and had an email conversation with Henry Ivry about the website I’m working on for him.

My final task of the week was to create a spreadsheet template and accompanying data dictionary for the data for the interactive map for Ophira’s HiMuJe Malabar project.  Project RA Renu Abraham will be using this template to record the data for all of the places relating to the project’s digital editions that we want to visualise on a map, and I will then create the map.  It took the best part of a morning to define the structure and describe all of the columns, but hopefully this will be of use.  It’s been a rather busy week, with lots more to continue with next week too.