I worked a total of four days over the past two weeks, and was on holiday for the remainder.  During this time I had a meeting to further discuss a place-names related AHRC proposal I’m involved with.  I can’t really say much more about it at this stage, but the proposal is coming together.  I also had to spend some time working with IT Support and Luca to figure out why our local server kept going offline repeatedly.  It looks like this was caused by the server getting swamped by requests from one particular source (almost certainly bot or AI) and thankfully IT Support were able to block this, after which the server was stable again.  It’s something we’re going to have to keep looking out for in future.  I also spent a bit of time working with Luca to get automatic WordPress updates working on our local server, as the way sites had been set up meant that the setting was not working.  Luca managed to find a solution to this, which is really great.

I also spent a bit more time working on the Burns Supper Map, creating a record for it on this site (see https://digital-humanities.glasgow.ac.uk/project/?id=156), adding more suppers that had been submitted via the survey and making some requested edits to existing suppers.  I also set up access to Google Analytics for the other two members of the project team.

In addition, I investigated an issue with the Scots Syntax Atlas after someone suggested that the linguists’ atlas was looking somewhat blurry.  I managed to figure out why this might be the case, although I’m not entirely sure whether this is a new issue or if the markers always looked like that.  I contacted the project PI and suggested a couple of updates, but I haven’t heard back yet so will need to wait and see what she says.

I spent most of the remainder of my time working on updates to our new test interface for Dictionaries of the Scots Language and working through the list of outstanding items for the DOST Auld Laws project.  For the DSL I completed the updates to the bibliography page that I began working on a couple of weeks ago.  I implemented pagination of the entries associated with bibliographical items, with navigation bars appearing above and below the entries, with 20 appearing per page and ‘jump to page’ buttons also appearing, just like with the search results.  This works pretty well, but is somewhat cumbersome for someone like Sir Walter Scott, who is referenced in 2861 entries, split over 144 pages.  We don’t have this issue with the search results are these are capped at 500 (25 pages) so we might need to think of other ways of handling this.

I also ensured that headword searches that don’t yield any results automatically perform a fulltext search for the term supplied.  This works on the live site, but only when both dictionaries are selected.  With the new site there are separate quick searches for SND and DOST so the additional search wasn’t being triggered.  It is now, as is the advanced headword search for both dictionaries.

I also made tweaks to the DSL’s new regional map based on feedback I’d received – adding in some content where we previously had placeholder text and ensuring the ‘About’ popup didn’t disappear off the bottom of smaller screens and a few other small updates.  I then began to look at the ancillary pages and how we can make them look a bit nicer.  I spent a bit of time on the ‘Word of the Week’ page and liaised with William Ashford, who is responsible for such content about this, and further updates that were going to make to the ancillary content closer to the launch date of the new site (which will hopefully be in November).

For the DOST Auld Laws project I added the top navigation bar that will link the site in with the SCOTS Corpus and CMSW.  I added in copyright information and added facilities to download page images and the XML files for each document.  These being up a pop-up asking for users to abide by the license before leading to the actual content, which hopefully won’t be too annoying.  I also added in the ‘cite’ popup to all document pages, which took a little time to implement, and added in Google Analytics.  I also made the image thumbnails on the document overview pages smaller and placed them in a collapsible section that is closed by default, plus I removed the introduction to the documents page, as this will be covered by the homepage.

I also removed some pages that didn’t have content (e.g. blank pages) from the beginning and end of some of the documents and I added a feature to turn off and on the line highlighting feature.  The highlighting feature allows the user to click on a line of text in the image or text for a page and for that line to be highlighted in both the image and the text, which is pretty nice.  Unfortunately the line highlighting gets in the way of the image viewer’s zoom and pan functionality on touchscreens, making it a somewhat unreliable and frustrating experience.  This new feature removes the option to ‘click’ on a line, meaning pointer events are not intercepted and make their way reliably through to the image viewer, which works much more smoothly.

Also this week I had an email conversation about user feedback and walkthough videos for the STAR resources and booked my accommodation for the DHC conference in Sheffield.  Next week I’m back in Glasgow and back working a full week, with summer holidays all over.