This was a four-day week for me as I’d taken Friday off (and I will also be off for the first three days of next week).  I finally managed to assign some time this week to implementing updates to the new Dictionaries of the Scots Language interface based on feedback that had been sent to me earlier this year.  I spent most of Monday and Tuesday working on this.

I can’t share any screenshots of the new interface at this stage, but I updated the search results box in the entry page to remove the tab for the other dictionary when performing a search (quick or advanced) for a specific dictionary.  This avoids misleading people as it otherwise the tab displays zero results for the other dictionary when in fact it just means the dictionary wasn’t actually searched.  Now when a quick search is performed, the other tab heading is replaced by a link to search the other dictionary.  Pressing on this performs whatever search you’ve executed (quick or advanced) on the other dictionary.

I also tweaked the font colour of the inactive tabs.  I realised that the white text on grey made it look like the tabs were disabled, when they’re not, they’re just inactive.  I therefore made the font darker, which I think works a lot better.  I then added in a button that scrolls the page to the search / browse box.  This appears above the entry header (and in the ‘sticky’ header that appears as you scroll the page) and only appears on narrower screens (where the infobox appears below rather than beside the entry text).  Where the entry is in the search results the text is ‘Scroll to results list’ with a down arrow.  Otherwise the text is ‘Scroll to browse list’.  The DSL team had requested that results term highlighting should be off by default, so I made this change too.

I then began to rework the bibliography page based on feedback.  We’ve decided to go with the version of the bibliography page that displays the quotations from any associated entries in addition to the headwords and links through to the entry pages.  This required some reworking of the API so that rather than returning individual citations, it brings back entries with each associated citation as part of this.  This means that multiple citations for an entry no longer appear as separate items in the list but are grouped by their entry, much like the quotation search results.  I also updated the count above the citations to display both the number of entries the item appears in as well as the number of citations (e.g. ‘Cited 718 times in 597 entries’) and each citation also includes its date as well now.  However, the order of citations needs to be the order they appear in the entry and not date order, otherwise the links through from the citation may end up taking you to the wrong one in the entry (as I discovered when I set things to date order).

The display of entries and citations is not exactly identical to the search results.  There is no sparkline as unfortunately this is not included as part of the bibliography data and I’d need to rework the database and API in order to include them.  Also, the quotations are in a larger font than the ones in the quotations search results as they seemed a bit small, and the headword isn’t highlighted in the quotations as this is something performed by the Solr search engine and isn’t available as things currently stand for the bibliographies.  I still need to add in pagination, which I didn’t have time to work on this week but will hopefully implement soon.

I also participated in a Teams meeting with the DSL this week that involved their interns reporting back about user engagement and observations about the website.  It was very interesting to hear their feedback and it will give us lots to think about as we continue to improve the resource.

Other than working for the DSL, I also made some last-minute updates to the Burns Supper Map before its official launch over the weekend.  The resource is now available for anyone to use at https://burns-supper-map.gla.ac.uk.  I wasn’t able to attend the launch as I was away on holiday but from what I’ve heard it was a great success.

I also spent a bit of time fixing an issue with the Anglo-Norman Dictionary where certain entries that had an apostrophe in their headwords (e.g. j’) were not loading while others were.  The reason for the discrepancy was because some headwords had curly apostrophes and other had straight ones.  The straight ones were getting encoded (e.g. “j'”) and were then not getting found.  Once I managed to figure this out I was able to fix the issue.

On Wednesday I had a lengthy online meeting for the HiMuJe Malabar project to discuss the interactive travel routes.  The meeting lasted about two and a half hours but it was worthwhile as we all have a much clearer idea of how to proceed with the routes now.  I just need to wait until the team sends me some initial travel routes using the spreadsheet template I sent them and then I’ll be able to continue my work on this.

On Thursday I participated in a Teams call with colleagues from Nottingham and Cardiff Universities to discuss a place-names proposal that I am likely to be involved with.  I can’t really say much more about it at the moment, but it’s all sounding very interesting.  I spent a few hours after the meeting writing a document containing some initial thoughts about how the technical infrastructure for the project could work.

I was then off on holiday on Friday and I won’t be back at work again until next Thursday.