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
Month: July 2026
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.
Week Beginning 13th July 2026
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.
Week Beginning 6th July 2026
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.