This was a three-day week for me because Friday was Good Friday and I’d taken the Thursday off as well. Despite this, I still managed to work on four different projects. Last week for the Playbills project I’d written a script to process performer names, including splitting this up into titles, forenames, surnames and other names, and also assigning gender. What I’d spotted and hadn’t had time to address is that there are several thousand performer names that are actually multiple performers that would need to be split into individual people. I spent most of Monday working on a script that would split these multiple performers up and process them all individually. This managed to reduce the number of unprocessed performers from 1271 to 414 (and most of the ones remaining are either blank or have text like ‘performer unknown’). I saved all performers in spreadsheets so Deven can check them – as of yet I haven’t made any updates to the database. There are 48,234 individual performers that were successfully processed by my script and a further 3,491 that were processed from multiple performers, leaving just 414 unprocessed performers, so I’m pretty happy at how successful my scripts have been.
Also for the Playbills project this week I had further discussions with Deven about downgrading certain plays to ‘special attractions’, which are things like songs and dance that are not full plays. Deven had also completed work on the spreadsheet that mapped out which performances involved the same plays (even if their titles were not exactly the same) that I will use to generate canonical records for plays. This spreadsheet also notes which plays should be downgraded and others that should be deleted entirely.
Whilst working on the scripts that will generate canonical records, downgrade plays and delete others I spotted some issues with the spreadsheet, such as plays being marked for deletion that looks like legitimate plays to me. Some other rows in the spreadsheet had been marked as both to be merged and deleted, which wasn’t right. I sent a list of possible issues to Deven and I’ll need to take this up with her once I’m back from my holiday.
For the Burns Supper Map project I had an in-person meeting the Cleo and Pauline to discuss the map, the interface, the data and our plans for the weeks ahead. It was a great meeting and really useful to meet up in person. Everyone is very happy with how the map interface is coming along and we have decided which of the test interfaces I’d developed would be used for the live site (mostly the first test interface but with the fonts from the second one). I have a 14 point ‘to do’ list for the project that I’ll work through once I’m back from my holiday.
For the HiMuJe Malabar project I wrote a non-technical specification document for the map I’ll be developing for the project, based on the discussions I had with Renu and Ophira at our meeting last week. I’ve got a pretty good idea about what needs to be developed now and I sent the first draft of my document to Renu and Ophira for feedback.
The remainder of my time was spent trying to digitise an old cassette tape of Scots and Gaelic poetry for Alan Riach in Scottish Literature. I had hoped I’d be able to plug an old tape player into my laptop to do this, but then I realised my laptop (and most modern computing equipment) doesn’t have a line-in port so this wouldn’t work. I then asked Jane Stuart-Smith whether there may be facilities in the GULP lab that I could use, and while there was a tape player we were unable to get it connected to any computer in the lab. I finally managed to digitise the tape by digging my old Hi-Fi out of my attic at home and plugging it into an old PC. Thankfully this worked and I recorded each individual poem as a separate MP3, then sent these to Alan.
I was off on Thursday and Friday, and I’ll be off for Easter for all of the following week and will return to work on Monday the 13th of April. So that’s all from me for now.