I began feeling unwell on Monday this week, but managed to struggle through until Thursday morning, by which point I just couldn’t sit at my desk any more.  I was then off work sick on Thursday and Friday.

Despite coming down with something I still managed to get quite a bit done on Monday to Wednesday this week.  On Monday I mainly focussed on the Playbills project.  I manually sorted all but three of the remaining plays that didn’t have canonical records and asked Deven to further investigate the remaining three.  I then added the canonical play data to the output produced by the API and wrote a script that would output all of the playbill data for every playbill as JSON files.  This will be used for offline analysis by Deven.

On Tuesday I continued to work on the map for the HiMuJe Malabar project, mostly tidying up some loose ends with the map.  I implemented the URL shortener and set up the ‘share / cite’ options so that now if you open a place record and press on the ‘Share / Cite’ tab this loads content, with the citation text being dynamically generated based on the map options that are currently selected.  It’s also now possible to press the ‘Share’ button at the bottom of the map menu to share or cite a specific map view as opposed to a specific record.

I also implemented the ‘Reset map’ option on the ‘Home’ menu and pressing on this resets the map to the default view and categorisation type and I finally sorted out the polygons on the map so they should always now appear behind the markers, even when turning layers on and off in the legend.

The last thing I implemented was the ‘Table view’.  If you press on this button at the bottom of the map menu it opens a popup containing all of the data in tabular form.  I haven’t included the references in this as this is too much data for such a table, but I have included a count of the number of references for each place.  Similarly, I’ve only included the latitude and longitude for each place and not the full GeoJSON shapes for the polygons.  You can press on a column heading to order the table by that column (press a second time to reverse the order).  I think it will be quite a useful view, for example if you know the name of a place but are not sure exactly where it is located you can order the table by placename and find it.  Pressing on a placename in the table closes the popup, centres the map on the location and (after an intentional brief delay so you can appreciate where on the map you’re looking at) the relevant record popup opens.  I might see about highlighting the place’s marker to make it clearer which is the relevant one in areas where there are many.

I still need to implement categorisation by certainty, but as of yet we don’t have any certainty data in the JSON file so I’m leaving this for now.  I’m intending to start on the travel routes soon.  We don’t have any routes available yet, but I’m going to create a test route and create the interface for plotting the connections along the route so we can see how this might work.

On Wednesday I continued to work on the DOST Auld Laws project.  I managed to fix the issue with multiple results in one line causing the in-page navigation to stop working.  This required quite a bit of reworking as the results were identified by line and instead I needed to add in a new way of identifying that a result may be on the same line but is actually a different result.  I did this by counting the number of results per line and using this figure in addition to the line ID to track the results, adding this counter to the URL that is used to reach the document page from the search results, with the document page then taking this figure and using it to ascertain which result is the current one and allowing the results traversal on the document page to function.

I then moved onto looking at results page ordering.  Previously the search results were ordered by document name, document page and line, but I wanted to add further sort options via a drop-down list to the right of the ‘you searched for…’ box.  In addition to the default ordering, this allows you to order by highlighted term (useful for searches like ‘*other’ where the start of terms may differ) and a concordance-like word position.  The latter allows you to sort the results by up to 5 words to the left or right of the term, with the selected position highlighted in cyan.  The screenshot below shows the search for ‘*other’ ordered by the second word to the left of the term:

 

This was a particularly large and complex update to implement as many parts of the code had to be rewritten, but I think it’s worth it.  The final update I implemented was to ensure that the ‘return to search results’ button in the search bar of the document page now takes you back to the specific results page and retains the ordering you’ve selected rather than taking you to the first page of results and the default ordering.

Also this week I set up a bare-bones WordPress site for Craig Lamont’s new project, and I’ll meet with him over the summer to get this fully set up.  I also tweaked the Burns Supper Map to ensure long subtitles for the charts don’t end up overlapping with the ‘hamburger’ menus for each chart and read through the findings of the user survey for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language that I’d been sent, and which was on the whole very positive.