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

Books and Borrowing: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers, 1750-1830

Books and Borrowing uncovers and reinterprets the history of reading in Scotland in the period 1750 to 1830 through 144,000 borrowing records across 18 libraries. 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

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

Mackintosh Architecture: Context, Making and Meaning

The project provides a richly-illustrated Catalogue of all known architectural projects by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, including over 1200 drawings by Mackintosh and the practice, analytical and contextual essays, a timeline and glossary. Find out more

Bess of Hardwick's Letters

Bess of Hardwick's Letters brings together, for the first time, the remarkable letters written to and from Bess of Hardwick (c.1521/2 or 1527-1608), one of Elizabethan England's most famous figures. 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

TheGlasgowStory

As told by some of Scotland's best writers, and illustrated with thousands of images from the collections of the city's world-famous libraries, museums and universities. From football to fashions, Auchenshuggle to Yoker, you'll find it all here. 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

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

Week Beginning 19th January 2026

Posted on26th January 202626th January 2026Authorbaitken

I worked on many different projects this week, but the one I spent the most time on was the Dictionaries of the Scots Language. I’ve not done much work for the DSL since the intensive period I spent developing the new website interface and deploying it on our test server ahead of the face-to-face meeting in mid-November. I had a list of further updates I needed to make following on from this meeting, but I needed to work on other projects since then and hadn’t got around to it. I’d also received a number of emails about changes to the presentation of entries reflecting the structural changes to the entry XML that I’d put to one side.

On Wednesday I had an online call scheduled with the DSL team to discuss the new front-end and it seemed like a good opportunity to get back to grips with all of my outstanding DSL tasks. This mainly involved making updates to the XSLT on our test server to tweak the layout of various items in the new entry XML structure, such as adding commas between tags when they are rendered, ensuring certain tags or attributes that weren’t getting rendered before appeared in the generated HTML, updating the styles of certain elements like the content warning labels, fixing a few bugs such as the ‘sticky’ heading not displaying in certain circumstances. There were at least 20 such items that needed investigating, fixing and testing, so this took quite some time to work through, but I managed to complete it all during the course of the week.

The meeting itself was very useful and as always it was good to catch up with some of the other DSL team members. There’s going to be a big push towards getting the new website interface ready for publication this year, and I’m obviously going to be involved in this process. I already have a number of items I need to sort out with the new interface and I’ll try and get started on these over the coming weeks.

I also spent a bit of time this week working for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, investigating a strange occurrence with the publication of updates to entries, which turned out to be a user rather than a system issue, reinstating the links out from entries to the DMF dictionary, as their website is now properly back online again, and tweaking the wording of the quick search and ‘jump to entry’ text throughout the site.

I also did small amounts of work for several other projects, such as updating the licensing statements across the Seeing Speech and Star sites, fixing an issue with the ‘download song’ facilities on the Editing Robert Burns site, sorting an issue with the HiMuJe Malabar site, submitting my expenses from the Zurich workshop, exporting some SCOSYA data for Jennifer Smith, helping to sort out an issue with the Helsinki Corpus, and having a conversation with Clara Cohen about a new proposal she’s putting together. I also made some further updates to the VARICS look-up system, adding in some introductory text, some further references, and reworking the measurement processing so that when a red or amber result is given new textual sections about what this means and what the next steps should be appear underneath in collapsible accordion sections.

Also this week I had a meeting with the Burns Supper Map team to discuss the data that is now coming in and how and when I should start working on a new interactive map to visualise it. I also put in a request for a new subdomain for the project that was set up by the end of the week. Next week I’ll probably write a brief specification document for the front-end.

My final project of the week was the Place-names of Armagh project, for which I started working with some existing place-name data for the area. There are around 230 place-names and several thousand historical forms and I spent quite some time researching how the data was structured and how it might be mapped onto the Glasgow place-names system. This included analysing the geospatial data, including shapefiles for Townlands and what I though was Parishes (but actually turned out to be the same as for Townlands). I had hoped to be able to import the data by the end of the week, but my analysis of the data raised a lot of questions that still need to be addressed, and I’ll need to continue with this next week.