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

Interactive Map of Burns Suppers Worldwide

Featuring more than 1000 Burns Suppers across all 7 continents and in 75 countries around the world, this resource seeks to record, illustrate, and offer new insights into the ways in which the tradition of the Burns Supper continues to be maintained, adapted and reimagined in the 21^st century. 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 It replicates Goldsworthy's Slide Cabinet Index, and includes previously unpublished material from Goldsworthy's Sketchbook Diaries.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

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

Curious Travellers

The project explores Romantic-period accounts of journeys into Wales and Scotland with a focus on the writings of the Flintshire naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), whose published Tours of both countries did so much to awaken public interest in the ‘peripheries’ of Britain. Find out more

SCOTS: Scottish Corpus Of Texts and Speech

The Scottish Corpora project has created large electronic corpora of written and spoken texts for the languages of Scotland, featuring nearly 4.6 million words of text, with audio recordings to accompany many of the spoken texts. 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

The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler: A Catalogue Raisonné

The online catalogue includes some 550 oil paintings and over 1700 works on paper dating from ca 1850 to 1903. The evolution of each painting from sketch to final oil is described and illustrated. 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

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

Week Beginning 3rd November 2025

Posted on10th November 202510th November 2025Authorbaitken

I spent pretty much the entirety of this week continuing to develop the new interface for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language website, applying the Bootstrap-based mock-up I’d created many months ago to an instance of the actual DSL website running on my laptop. I can’t really go into too much detail about the new interface or provide any screenshots at this stage, but it’s been a pretty intensive process as every aspect of the old interface needs to be changed and various parts of it need to be integrated with WordPress, for example making widgets and ensuring the new layout works with different templates.

I managed to complete the bulk of the work this week (although this did include working several hours over the weekend too), in preparation for next week’s face-to-face DSL team meeting. This included the search results pages, the advanced search page, the dictionary entry page and the bibliography page. This may not seem like a very long list, but there was a huge amount of work to do on each of these pages, such as implementing the site panel for the entry page that features the dictionary browser, the search results browser and a new ‘entry log’ that keeps a record of entries the user has looked at during their session. I reckon the new interface is looks really good, and is a massive improvement on the live site, although there will inevitably be many further changes to be made before anything goes live.

I still need to complete the new top-level ‘About’ page, which acts as a large menu page, plus ensure that all regular WordPress pages work with the new interface and include the quick search. I’m hoping to finish these things off and then apply the interface to our online test instance of the site ahead of Wednesday’s meeting next week.

Also this week I spent a bit more time preparing for a talk about Speak For Yersel and Jennifer Smith and I were scheduled to give at the University of Edinburgh the week after next. However, later in the week we heard from the organisers that the University will be on strike when our talk is scheduled and we therefore reached a decision to cancel. It’s possible that we’ll be able to reschedule, as we are not directly involved in the strike action, but we’ll just need to see.

Also this week I created an initial version of a website for Henry Ivry’s project and contacted researcher Jenny Buckley with some further information about the processing of historical newspapers that might be of use for her project. I also made a small update to the Speech Star resource and had an email conversation with Eleanor Lawson about access restrictions for the resources data.

I participated in an online meeting regarding sharing the SCOSYA data with the Mozilla Foundation this week, and I also had a meeting with Pauline Mackay and Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman to discuss a new phase for the Interactive Map of Burns Suppers. I subsequently spent a bit of time reviewing some materials for the site. Finally, I exported some data from the Historical Thesaurus that we’re going to share with another project.