On Monday this week I had a meeting with Joanna Kopaczyk and Pia Lehecka to discuss the DOST source materials transcription project.  The materials have all been transcribed using Transkribus and the project needs a front-end created through which the images and text can be searched and browsed.  A mockup interface has already been very kindly produced for us by Dario Kampkaspar, who created a pathway for converting Transkribus XML to TEI XML (see ‘Page2tei’ here: https://help.transkribus.org/downloading) so hopefully it won’t be too difficult to create something similar for the entire dataset, as task I’ll need to have completed by the end of May.

On Tuesday I had a meeting with Deven Parker regarding her Playbills project.  We met with a PhD student in Computing Science who has been developing the pathway for sending playbill images to AI and processing the files that are returned.  We needed to make a few tweaks to this pathway, and also to figure out how we can run things ourselves and it was a really useful meeting to participate in.  After the meeting Deven and I had a further meeting to discuss the data extraction and processing I’ve been doing, and subsequent data cleaning and amalgamation tasks that will need to be undertaken.  Deven is going to try and proofread and correct the YAML files that were originally generated by the AI as an initial step, and this will mean I’ll need to delete my data and regenerate everything from this updated dataset.  I can’t therefore do much with the data I currently have, but will instead focus on developing the methods for browsing the playbills in the front-end, something I’ll begin working on next week.

I also met with Louis Strange on Tuesday this week to discuss a new proposal he’s putting together.  It was a useful meeting and I gave him some advice about possible ways his data could be presented and used online.  I can’t say much more about the proposal at the moment, but hopefully it will be funded.

Other than meetings, I spent quite a bit of time this week working on the interface for the new interactive map of Burns Suppers.  I set up the basic map interface (using a satellite map with labels) and set up the map menu using the components I created for the Iona place-names project.  For now the side panel has the same colours as the Iona map, but this will be changed in time.

My first task was to ensure that all of the supper records could be loaded into the map, and these work with the clustering tool.  Currently the map marker is the same as the old supper map (red background, knife and fork icon).  I did try using a haggis icon that we found online, but it’s not really going to work as when scaled down to a suitable size it just looks like an indistinct blob.  I also tried using the Font Awesome ‘lemon’ icon as it looked vaguely like a haggis, but I’m not sure this is ideal either.  We’re going to need to give this some further thought.

I added in all of the textual information about the suppers to the record popup and the map is already beginning to shape up quite nicely.  I then added in a facility to allow you to bookmark / share exact views of the map (position and zoom level) using the Leaflet Hash plugin.  Eventually the URLs will also feature filters etc but I haven’t implemented that yet.  But I have implemented the filter options themselves, all of which should now be working.  If you press on the ‘Filters’ menu item you should now see some text about the filters and a drop-down list featuring the various filter types.  I realised my specification document hadn’t included number of guests as a filter type so I’ve added that in too.  One you select a type (e.g. ‘Poems and songs’) the individual filter options are listed, together with counts of the number of suppers that feature them.  You can then press on an option and the map will update to only display the matching suppers.  The screenshot below shows the map with ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ selected.  Note that as of yet the map doesn’t zoom and pan to ensure all matching suppers appear in view – instead the map just stays where you previously had it.  I’m not sure now whether making the map automatically change position is a good idea or not, so it’s something to think about.

I also updated the ‘Home’ menu to add in the title of the resource and to make the buttons work.  The ‘help’ button now opens a popup with some placeholder text while the ‘reset’ button resets the map to include all data and the default position and zoom.  I’ve updated this as previously it was zoomed in on Scotland.  Now the map is zoomed out and shows much of the world (depending on your screen size).  I also ensured the ‘Attribution and copyright’ link in the bottom right now works, displaying a popup with some placeholder text, and I’ve added some text to the ‘Advanced’ menu section, although the advanced filter options are still to do.  I also tested all this on my phone and everything currently in place works fine on it.  Next week I’ll probably work on the advanced filter options, which will allow users to combine different filters.

I spent most of Thursday updating the APIs for various sites, as Luca had spotted some inefficiencies that could be improved.  I’ve now updated all of the APIs that we host locally, but I still need to implement the changes on our externally hosted sites.

On Friday I worked for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, investigating some non-urgent issues with searching that had been sent to me in November last year.  It turns out that these issues are all sorted with the new DSL interface we’re hoping to launch this year, so I didn’t need to make any changes to anything.  I also made some updates to the layout of some aspects of the new tags on the new DSL website, and the rest of my time was spent making further tweaks to the new DSL website that have been on my ‘to do’ list for a while.

I’d spotted that the search results in the side panel on entries was including blank links that would be highlighted when hovered over and I managed to identify the issue and sort this now.  It turns out I’d already sorted this for searches that involve both SND and DOST, but hadn’t applied the update to individual dictionary searches.  I also created a new version of the bibliography page that lists the actual quotations as well as providing links to the entry pages.  I can’t really share any screenshots of this for now, and I don’t know if we want to include the quotations or not, but I thought I’d create this test version so we can see how it might work.

I also made the links from the bibliographies on both the test version and the main version take you to the actual quotation within the entry, rather than dumping you at the top of the entry.  I used our purpley-pink highlight colour to highlight the citation to make it easy to spot which one brought you to the entry.  This actually took quite some time to implement as a bibliographical item can be cited multiple times in an entry and in such cases the system needs to know which one to link to, but I reckon linking through to the actual quotation from the bibliograph page will be a hugely useful addition.