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 Historical Thesaurus of English

The University of Glasgow’s Historical Thesaurus of English is a unique resource charting the development of meaning in the huge and varied vocabulary of English. It consists of almost every recorded word in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, all arranged into detailed hierarchies of meaning. Find out more

Scots Syntax Atlas

The Scots Syntax Atlas presents the results of over 100,000+ acceptability judgments from over 500 speakers on over 250 morphosyntactic phenomena. The Atlas also contains a text-to-sound aligned corpus of spoken data totalling 275 hours and over 3 million words. 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

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 It replicates Goldsworthy's Slide Cabinet Index, and includes previously unpublished material from Goldsworthy's Sketchbook Diaries.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

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

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

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

The Berwickshire Place-Name Resource

The resource includes historical research for all Berwickshire place-names on the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 Landranger map, including more than 1,600 place-names and 7,000 historical forms presented via a series of interactive maps. Find out more

Week Beginning 23rd February 2026

Posted on2nd March 20262nd March 2026Authorbaitken

I continued to work on the Burns Supper Map from Monday to Wednesday this week, with my first task being to import the public domain data into the map, taking the total number of suppers on the map to 751. I then implemented the advanced filter options. You can now open the advanced filter popup and select any of the filters you’re interested in. When you press the ‘apply filters’ button at the bottom of the popup it closes and the map displays only those suppers that match your criteria. The ‘Advanced’ section of the side menu then displays the number of matching suppers, your selected filters and buttons to refine or choose new filters, as the screenshot below demonstrates:

Note that I haven’t done any work on the colour schemes for the map yet – it’s all just using the colours taken from the Iona place-names map, but this will change. I also updated the map so that both the advanced filter and regular filter options now reposition the map to show all matching suppers when selected. However, icons on the left of the map can get obscured by the map menu. It has a tendency to sit on top of the US. I’m not sure what to do about this – I could ensure the map zooms out further, or I could close the side menu, although this might just confuse people.

I also updated the non-advanced filters section so that it displays the total number of suppers. However, a supper may have multiple filter options in a filter type so this total will not be the same figure as adding up all of the counts for individual options (e.g. one supper can have multiple toasts so will appear in the count for each individual toast that it features). I then created the table view. Pressing on the ‘Table view’ button will display all suppers currently found on the map in tabular form, and you can reorder the rows by pressing on a heading (e.g. ordering the rows by country). Pressing on the venue name link closes the table view, centres the map on the supper and opens the supper’s in-map record. Note that if you’ve performed a filter then the table only contains the filtered data.

Setting up the advanced filter option was especially time-consuming to implement so it was good to get that finished. There’s still a lot left to do, such as ensuring filter options get added to the page URL to enable bookmarking / sharing / citing of specific results. This is going to be another big job, and one that I’ll hopefully tackle next week.

I also spent some time this week drafting some text with Luca for a page about the technical developers across the College and the services we offer. This is not yet live, but will be a useful information point for staff who are looking to create an online resource for their data.

On Tuesday this week I participated in a meeting to discuss a new proposal being led by Sara Pons-Sanz at Cardiff that Glasgow will be involved with. It was a useful meeting and we all have a clearer idea about what the project will entail and how Glasgow will contribute. I had a further meeting on Friday with Jennifer Smith and Janine Illian about statistical analysis of the Speak For Yersel data and it looks like we’ll be getting some people in statistics working with our data, which is great.

I spent the remainder of the week working on the Playbills project. I’ve begun to set up an API and pages that will allow people to browse the playbills data. We still have a lot of work to do with the data, such as creating single, canonical records for venues, plays and other data types, so it’s likely that all of the data will need to be replaced at some point, but as the data structures are mostly finalised I decided to start work on some aspects of the front-end. So far I’ve created pages for browsing venues, listing playbills and browsing genres. I hope to continue with this next week.