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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week Beginning 6th July 2026

Posted on13th July 202623rd July 2026Authorbaitken

I returned to work on Monday this week after a lovely holiday. Most of my time this week was spent working for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, processing a new dataset exported from their editing system and integrating it into the website. The reason this process took considerably longer than usual is that the data had a major structural difference: Entry parts of speech had been moved, rationalised and restructured. Previously parts of speech appeared as elements within <meta> but also appeared embedded in the main entry where they were only tagged with HTML italic tags. There were more than 500 different combinations of parts of speech and things like homonym numbers were mixed in with them too.

The DSL editors have spent a huge amount of time working on the parts of speech to separate them out, standardise them and ensure other data such as homonym numbers are stored in a separate but related manner. The new structure also ensures that entry parts of speech are only stored once in the entry XML using a structure that makes sense semantically rather than for display only.

As the new entry XML in the data export now differed markedly from the earlier structure I then had to rewrite my data processing scripts, update the database and Solr cores, and the API and front-end to deal with the new structure. This was a lot of work. My first step was to create a new table to hold the individual POS data, consisting of a part pf speech and associated ‘hom’, ‘syn’ and ‘infl’ values. I then updated my extraction script so that the existing pos field in the entry table now gets its content from the ‘origpos’ attribute (so we continue to have a record of the original part of speech) and then to populate the new POS table to store each individual pos, including the value, hom, syn and infl data (where applicable) for each entry.

With this update in place I could then (after running a few smaller-scale tests) process every entry in the SND and DOST export files, which resulted in 35,655 parts of speech records being generated for SND entries and 49,828 being generated for DOST.

My next step was to update the entry browse order, which is used to decide in which order the entries appear in the browse pane when viewing entries. This previously used the old POS system to decide in which order entries with the same headword appeared (e.g. so that nouns appeared first). I had to update this to use the new POS system, and also ensure that the POS labels, which are used in the browse pane, the search results and the entry header.

With this update in place I then ran my scripts to process the citations and bibliographies. After that I worked on the Solr cores we use for search purposes. These consist of an ‘entry’ core used for headword and fulltext searching, and a ‘quotation’ core used for searching the individual quotations. Both of these needed to be updated to include new POS fields, which will eventually allow me to add parts of speech filters to the search facilities. I created new Solr cores for each, both featuring new POS fields, after which I would update my script that generates the data to populate the cores to ensure the POS data was included.

With the new cores successfully populated with the new data I then needed to update the API to work with the new POS fields (e.g. so that the labels returned for use in the search results and browse pane use the new POS data). After that I then needed to update the XSLT scripts that process the entry XML files for display to ensure that the new POS structure is displayed when viewing an entry.

At this point all of the updates were still running on my laptop, and with everything in place and tested the final step was to migrate everything to our test server. I don’t have direct access to the server so needed the help of someone with this access in order to complete tasks such as creating and populating the new Solr cores, and thankfully Luca agreed to help out. The process went remarkably smoothly and by the end of Thursday the update was complete, with our test server displaying the new POS fields. I also made a number of other minor updates to the display of entries via the XSLT files that had been requested and it’s now over to the DSL editors to test everything out and make sure all is working as it should.

I spent the remainder of the week dealing with emails I’d received whilst I was away. I also had a meeting with Joanna about the DOST Auld Laws project, which is nearing completion now, and had a meeting with Renu regarding the display of polygons in the map for the HiMuJe Malabar project.