This week I began setting up the infrastructure for the new Place-names of Armagh project, which I’m working on with Mícheál Ó Mainnín at Queen’s University Belfast, setting up the database, content management system and the project’s WordPress-based front-end.  For now the WordPress site just has a very plain interface and two pages – a welcome page and a project news page, which is a blog page that can be used to post updates about the project.  I’ll continue to work on this once I hear more from Mícheál.

A slightly biggest task was setting up the database and CMS.  These are based on the system created for previous place-name projects so most of the work was already done, but as is usually the case, I needed to tailor the system to the current project, removing some fields that were not required, adding new ones in and ensuring everything works with place-names in both the NI and ROI areas.  We’d decided that the system would not be fully bilingual but would have fields for specifying English and Gaelic fields for names of places (main place-name and historical forms); all other fields will just be single fields, so for example  will not be separate fields for English and Gaelic descriptions.

As with the CMS I set up for the Comparative Kingship project (which covered both NI and ROI), the grid references are set up to use Irish grid references (e.g. ‘H 88144 4476’) and also ITM co-ordinates (e.g. 688077,844763).  A researcher can supply either the grid reference or ITM co-ordinates and the system then automatically generates the other, plus latitude, longitude and altitude.  These can all be manually overwritten if required.  There’s a handy resource called https://irish.gridreferencefinder.com that can be used to view the grid reference and ITM  for a point clicked on if the researchers are not gathering grid references from physical maps.  I still need to check whether using Irish grid references and ITM the correct approach for the project, as it’s possible that UK OS grid references will be more appropriate, as with the Scottish projects.  If so I can swap to them.

I also still need to know what parishes the project will cover so I can add these to the system, and eventually track down the GeoJSON shapefiles for them so we can plot parish boundaries.  There are a few other aspects that I may need to tweak too.  For example, for the Comparative Kingship project (an earlier project I was involved with which covered NI and ROI) we incorporated baronies in addition to parishes, and I need to know whether this are needed or not.  For now I have included them, but I may need to remove them if they are not needed.

It was as bit of a week for place-names projects, as on Thursday I met with Thomas Clancy to discuss the official launch of the interactive map-based resource for the Coalfield Communities / Place-names of Ayrshire project.  This resource features the same map interface I’ve developed for other place-names projects, such as Iona and Berwickshire but is not yet live.  We’re going to make some final tweaks to the data and the interface over the next week and the place is to launch it in mid December.

I also continued to work on the Fife place-names data, making good progress with the processing of the place-name elements.  As mentioned last week, there are more than 6,500 elements (i.e. distinct parts of a place-name, such as ‘-ton’) in the Fife data, and these need to be properly split up so they’re only stored once and then link to as many place-names as are relevant.  Before I get to this stage, though, I need to clean the data, as the scripts that migrated the original data form Word to the relational database structure was not 100% successful.  My first sweep was to fix issues with the language field, as if erroneous data appeared in this field it was likely that the entire record would need to be fixed.  I managed to batch-process many such issues, and I’ve almost managed to complete this stage of the cleaning process – there are maybe around 10 or 20 records that I still need to sort next week.  After that I should be able to migrate the element data to the data structure used by the other place-names projects and then think about setting up a CMS to enable researchers to take control of the data.

Also this week I participated in a lengthy call about the relationships between the interactive map and the digital edition for the HiMuJe Malabar project.  This wasn’t an easy meeting, but I think we may have identified a solution that might work for everyone.  I also attended the English Language and Linguistics seminar on Thursday and discussed next week’s Transkribus workshop with Joanna.

I also spent a bit of time working on Deven Parker’s Playbills project.  When processing the YAML files last week my Python script had encountered a few errors so I wrote another script to investigate these.  It turns out that 109 of the 110 error files are in the JSON rather than YAML format, which obviously caused problems for a script created to work with YAML data.  The final file had a value that began with an apostrophe that did not have a corresponding closing apostrophe, which the YAML processor didn’t like.  I’m hopefully going to meet with Deven next week to discuss the requirements for the online resource she wants to create for her data.

Finally this week, I had an email conversation with Wendy Anderson and Carole Hough about possible updates to the Mapping Metaphor resource.  We are going to meet next week to discuss this further.  They had also spotted an issue with the resource’s advanced search.  There was a problem with searches for ‘examples of metaphor’ that caused no results to be returned.  Other searches (e.g. for category name / descriptors) were working.  Thankfully it was pretty quick to fix this.