Week Beginning 20th July 2026
I worked on Thursday and Friday this week, having taken the other days off as a holiday. Whilst I was away there was an issue with the server on which we host a lot of our important websites, meaning they were unavailable from Sunday afternoon until about 5pm on Tuesday, and I had to spend some time liaising with Luca about what should be done and responding to users and project members who were unable to access the sites. I also had to spend some time once I was back updating everyone on the situation, and on Friday afternoon Luca and I met with Mike Irwin from IT Services to discuss the situation and what we could learn from it. Hopefully we have a plan but we’ll just need to see how things work out in future.
Over the weekend the Burns Supper Map (https://burns-supper-map.gla.ac.uk) had its official launch (thankfully this website is not hosted on the server that encountered issues) at the Burns Birthplace Museum. As I was away on holiday I wasn’t able to attend, but I was kept updated by the project team and it all went very well. After the launch a few more suppers came in, and some existing suppers needed their details updating, for example because their title was not quite right, or their position on the map needed tweaking, or further photos were submitted. I spent some time on Thursday making these updates. I also exported the data for the Old English Thesaurus as CSV files, which are going to be submitted to the Oxford Text Archive, responded to some queries from the Dictionaries of the Scots Language team and made a minor tweak to the parts of speech section of entries on our test server.
Other than my meeting with Luca and Mike during the afternoon, I spent most of Friday working on the travel routes for the HiMuJe Malabar project. I had been sent data for three travel routes to add to the map to test the travel route system I’d previously developed.
I updated my map code to link directly to the data source for the map that is generated from the digital edition and hosted at the University of Jena, so that new updates to places will automatically get pulled in. I also updated the code so that when you select a route from the menu the map displays the full extent of the route, which I think will be very helpful.
Some of the places that appear in the travel itineraries are not yet found in the places file, or are found but do not yet have location data so for now I’ve had to remove these from the travel routes. This isn’t a huge issue though, as for now the routes are really only for test purposes and I can add the missing locations in once they are available.
By the end of the week I’d added the three new routes to the map, although there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. For example, the colours used for the markers and routes are still not finalised and we’ll definitely need to ensure the route colour is not also used for a polygon. Currently Malabar is red, and so is the route, which makes things very confusing. I also need to work on the menu to break it up into sections by type and assign different colours to the routes (or possibly the types). But here is a screenshot showing the full extent of one of the trade routes:
I also had an email conversation with Tom Bartlett about a podcast site he created a while back that he would like to migrate to the University system. I’m going to have a meeting with him about this, hopefully in the next few weeks. I’m on holiday again next week and some of the following week, so it will be a while until my next update.
