I continued to work on the new interface for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language this week, ahead of the DSL’s face-to-face meeting on Wednesday at which I gave a demonstration of the interface.  There was a lot still to do before the meeting, and I ended up working several hours over the weekend to ensure everything was ready.  By Tuesday I’d managed to complete just about everything, although there are still a few formatting issues with some of the ‘history’ pages that I’ll need to tidy up at some point.  With the completed interface still only running locally on my laptop the next step was to deploy it to our online test instance of the DSL site, which thankfully only took a couple of hours to complete.

I then spent most of the rest of Tuesday writing and preparing the text of a walkthrough of the new interface for Wednesday’s meeting.  Of course, whilst creating this walkthrough I spotted several minor issues with the site and spent some further time addressing those too.  I didn’t need to be at the meeting in Edinburgh until the afternoon so in addition to running through my demo a few times on Wednesday morning, I also added a feature to the site’s bibliography page that I’d been meaning to implement for a while.  The bibliography page as it currently stands is a bit of a dead end on the site:  you search for an author or title and you reach a bibliographical record for a specific work or works.  There is nowhere to go from there – no pathway to take you from the record to the entries that cite the work or works.  We store this information in the database already, so I figured it would be good to add the links in.  I therefore updated the API to ensure a call for a bibliographical record also returned a list of all entries that cite the record, and updated the bibliography page to add in a count of these entries and links through to them.  I think this works really well – for example if you search for Irvine Welsh you can now find a list of all SND entries that feature a quote from one of his books.  The only downside is that some bibliographical records (especially for DOST) appear in thousands of dictionary entries, meaning thousands of links appear on the bibliography page.  I’ll need to think about how to handle this, as currently all links to entries just appear as in-line buttons.  We actually store the quoted text in the database so we could also display the specific quotes in the bibliography page if we want.  I also still need to update things so that the links through to the entries lead directly to the first matching quote.

My demonstration of the new interface on Wednesday went very well.  Everyone was very pleased with how the new site looks and functions and were also very pleased with the new bibliography page.  We had a good discussion session about further possible updates, and it’s now over to the DSL team to use the new interface over the next few weeks (or possibly months) and then send on any required updates to me.  I still can’t really share any screenshots of the new site at this stage, and it’s likely to be several months before it goes live, assuming the DSL team want to go live with it.

I’ve been suffering from what is most likely sciatica over the past couple of weeks, which has made it quite difficult to work.  I’ve generally been unable to leave the house much, although the pain eases off as the day goes on and I’m able to move more freely in the afternoons.  I’ve been unable to come into the University during this time, which has meant I’ve had to join some meetings online instead of in-person, and I also had to miss the Arts and Humanities developers coffee and catch-up that we’d scheduled for Tuesday this week.  I was able to make it across to Edinburgh on Wednesday as I didn’t have to leave the house until lunchtime and the pain wasn’t as bad by then.  Unfortunately the journey through exacerbated things and I was in quite a lot of pain the next day.  It was impossible for me to sit at my desk for more than a few minutes at a time and I’m afraid I had to take the day off sick.

I was still in a lot of pain on Friday but I managed to work again, and I spent the day catching up with emails and investigating the Hansard data that I last worked with some seven years ago, as Marc and Fraser have a student who wants to work with it.  I also spent a bit of time fixing an old Robert Burns resource that had stopped working.  The Jame Currie site (https://jamescurrie.gla.ac.uk/) is not one of mine, but had apparently not worked properly since a server update.  I fixed a number of issues with the code and got it working again.  I’ll need to see about fully overhauling the site at some point as it contains some very useful research data but has a rather ancient interface.  I also found some time to return to the migration of the Place-names of Fife data to the new place-names system, working through the historical form sources.  There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done on the data before it can be fully migrated, but I’m slowly making progress.