I was on holiday on Friday this week, and I’ll be on holiday all of next week too, and I’m writing this on holiday so it’s going to be a short report. I spent most of the week continuing with updates to the new Dictionaries of the Scots Language website ahead of the in-person project meeting on Wednesday. This included updating the region filters on the Advanced Search form to remove 34 regions that are not present in the data. I also completely overhauled the XSLT for displaying bibliographies, as I spotted several situations where the current XSLT was rendering the bibliographies incorrectly. This took quite some time to implement and test, but the results are much better. Some complex titles and author layouts that were previously messed up have now been sorted and inter-bibliography references, which were previously not displaying at all are now present and correct. I also spent some time working on the layout of the entry pages to make ‘combs’ entries display better, and after that all of the items on my very long ‘to do’ list were ticked off.
The in-person meeting on Wednesday went very well and it was a great opportunity to go through the new site with the rest of the team and discuss things. There are a number of other updates that I’ll need to make following on from the meeting, but nothing too major, which is encouraging.
Also this week I made some further updates to the travel routes on the HiMuJe Malabar map, although the data hosted at our partner in Germany has still not been updated due to a blockage in their data processing pipeline, so I’m unable to proceed very far with this as most of the new travel routes contain places that are not yet found in the data I have access to.
I also had a very productive meeting with the project team for the Armagh Place-names project, which required quite a bit of preparation beforehand and further investigation afterwards. I think we all have a clearer idea of the tasks that still need to be carried out now, though.
I also spoke with Matt Sangster about a talk we might be giving about the Books and Borrowing project and liaised with Faidon about the migration of some of our sites from local hosting to our third-party provider. I’ll be back at work the week of the 19th.
As with last week, I spent the bulk of this week continuing with the updates to the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, and spent the remainder of the time working on the interactive map for the HiMuJe Malabar project.
For the DSL I migrated all of the WordPress content from the live site to our test site. This brings all of the WordPress-based content (the non-dictionary pages, all of the ancillary content of the site) on our test site into line with the live site, meaning we can work on it in preparation to launching the new site in November. Unfortunately, replacing all of the WordPress content inadvertently broke a lot of new stuff on our test server, as it carried over the old DSL theme and none of the updates made via the new theme such as the About page and the homepage content, or even the ‘Older Scots’ page then existed. I took quite some time to sort all of this out, but I managed to do it and now the team can edit all of the ancillary content via the new site.
One of my main tasks for the week was to rework the site’s Quick Search bar. Previously this appeared within the page body as (generally) the first item in the page. I originally did this to make it clearer that the quick search was either for Modern or Older Scots, as the search bar appeared directly underneath the active tab. As we no longer have Modern and Older Scots tabs, having the search bar in the page body makes less sense and I figured it would be better to have the search bar in the header, where most people would expect to find it. I therefore removed the search bar from within all pages and updated the layout of the header to incorporate it there.
On wider screens the search bar appears directly to the right of the DSL site title, taking up no more than half of the page width, while on narrower screens the search bar appears below the site title and above the navigation bar and takes up the full page width (I can’t include screenshots of this for the moment). I also had to change the button colour to light blue rather than dark blue to distinguish the button from the header colour, and the hover-over colour is now the purple highlight colour. I also updated the text to replace ‘Modern Scots’ and ‘Older Scots’ with the new labels.
On most pages the search bar displays 1700-present. On the DOST page it displays ‘Before 1700’ and on the ‘about’ pages it displays both, with the dictionary selector visible. For the moment I’m not entirely sure what to do about the advanced search form and the search results pages, which currently just display ‘1700-present’ no matter what search result is shown. I’ll need to get some feedback from the team about this. I could update the search results to display the quick search option that matches the choice of dictionary (so DOST, SND or both), or I could remove the quick search bar entirely on the Advanced Search page. I’m not so sure about this, though, as it gives an inconsistent layout, even though it’s a bit pointless having both a quick and advanced search on the same page.
I also wondered whether we should just have the ‘both’ quick search bar on all pages, rather than chopping and changing across different parts of the site. The ‘both’ bar defaults to 1700-present and unless you specifically want to find ‘before 1700’ that’s all you ever need to see, but the option to search before 1700 is there for anyone who wants it. Plus it’s more consistent and reduces confusion. Also, if we always have the coverage selector visible we don’t then need to have ‘1700-present’ as placeholder text in the search box (unless we want it). It could just say ‘Search’ or ‘Search Scots’, which would take up less space on narrow screens. This is something to discuss at next week’s meeting.
With the new Quick Search bar in place, I then updated the homepage on the new website, although this is also something that will need discussion at new week’s meeting. After that I continued to work through my ‘To Do’ list. I updated the search results so that they now have the number of pages truncated and replaced with ‘…’ if there are more than 10 pages of results. The same is also true on the bibliography page for the list of entries. I also updated the tabs labels in the Advanced Search form, from ‘Entries’ and ‘Bibliography’ to ‘Entries’ and ‘Bibliographies’ to make them consistent.
I also fixed the old maps referenced in the ancillary content, as util now these never worked in the new site, and I replaced the hideous Paypal ‘Donate’ button on the ‘Donate’ page with one more in keeping with the new design. I then went through the JS and CSS files to remove stuff that was left over from the old design. This removed about 500 lines of code from the JS file, hopefully without affecting the functionality of the new site. I also went through the site on a narrow screen and tweaked things to make better use of the available space (e.g. there is less white space to the left and right of the search results lists), and I fixed the bug on the entry page where the sparkline tooltip wasn’t displaying until it was clicked on. It now works when you hover over it.
My final big task of the week for the DSL was to update the three lengthy essays about Scots so they display properly. The essays feature side panels for navigation and ‘cite’ options that were never properly migrated to the new site design and it took quote a long time to get everything updated and working. Two of the essays were split over multiple pages, and the side panel provided navigation through the pages, while the third essay was presented on one huge, long page, with the site panel acting as links to the various sections of the page. I somewhat foolishly decided to rework the latter to bring it into line with the structure of the other two. This was a much bigger job than I initially thought, as things like footnotes and inter-paragraph references needed to be updated, but I managed to get it done. I also added in ‘next’ and ‘previous’ buttons to the end of each essay page to help with the navigation.
Whilst working through this I realised that an issue with empty lines appearing as links in the entry page search results browser between entries had reappeared. This is something I’d fixed weeks ago and I realised that one of the updated I’d made this week must have broken something. After further investigation it turned out to have been caused by a tweak I’d made to save space on narrow screens, and I was able to fix the problem.
For the Malabar project I continued to work on the travel routes. I updated the code so that if multiple travel routes are selected they now have different line colours. I also removed the coloured border around locations in the routes as they could be misleading when a location is found in multiple active routes (e.g. if one is highlighted in green and the other red then highlighting the location in red isn’t helpful). I also addressed the issue where multiple routes are selected and different routes connect the same places. Previously in such cases one route’s line was positioned directly on top of the other’s, but now I’ve changed the offset of the dashed line for different routes, meaning it’s possible to see the dashes of multiple lines along the route. The screenshot below has far too many routes selected to be of practical use, but it demonstrates how the new dashed lines work. See for example the red and cyan lines in the bottom right.
I also updated the location popups to include a new ‘Travel Route’ tab where all occurrences of the location in travel routes are listed. Each stage appears as a link that opens the travel route at the selected stage when clicked on:
Also this week I updated the Place-names of Iona CMS, API and front-end after they were migrated to our third-party hosting supplier. Thankfully I didn’t need to make very many updates to the code for everything to work.
I divided most of my time this week between finishing work on the Scottish Life Writing CMS and continuing to develop the new website for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language. I’d started work on the Scottish Life Writing CMS last week and I completed a first version this week. It took a bit longer than I’d anticipated to develop it, mainly due to the issue of versions. Each work may have any number of associated versions (e.g. a new edition, an adaptation for stage) and each of these versions may have any number of associated people (e.g. multiple editors, or a translator and an adaptor). The data structure for this is pretty straightforward, but creating the front-end and processing for a form that allows this to be easily managed took some time. Versions needed to be dynamically added to the form as required, and then the option of adding multiple people to each also had to be added in, with each person box working as an auto-complete to bring back a list of people that match the characters the user types in. However, I managed to complete an initial version by Wednesday and then populated it with some sample data for test purposes.
For the DSL there was some follow-on stuff relating to the new search and filter options I’d developed last week to contend with. Vasilis has suggested that when a region is selected in the advanced search form or as a filter on the search results page that any areas contained with the selected region should also be searched for – so for example if you select the ‘Highlands’ dialect area then this should automatically search all regions that are part of this area, such as Argyll.
I wasn’t aware that searching for one area should also include all other areas contained within it. This was always going to be part of the map (and it is) so you can visualise area intersects and overlaps, but I didn’t realise this was also desired for the search, and I had some misgivings about this approach. It is likely to generate more results than we allow for many searches. For example, ‘Eastern Scots’ contains 102 areas, each of which may also contain multiple areas. If all are included then the search isn’t going to be usable as the results limit will be reached. It might be better to allow users to make their own selections based on the intersects on the map. This would also avoid confusion. For example, ‘Bute’ in the file of coverage includes ‘Arran’, so if we include everything then someone selecting ‘Bute’ would be unable to exclude the results for ‘Arran’, and may be confused as to why ‘Arran’ quotations are being returned when it’s a completely separate island and they didn’t select it.
Another issue is that the search indexes were not set up with this ‘contains areas’ requirement in mind. Each quotation in the index only has its specific areas listed – they do not also include the other regions that would also match the quotation. This would make results filtering by region rather tricky and the search queries very complicated. E.g. for ‘Eastern Scots’ the front-end would have to formulate a query that includes all 102 areas (and any areas each of these include) before passing it to the Solr index. This would be pretty awful to have to create the code for and would likely be slow. The other alternative would be to generate this data when the Solr index is being created (e.g. so that when a quotation has the area ‘Mid Scots’ it should also have the area ‘Eastern Scots’). That way a simple search for ‘Eastern Scots’ on its own would find all ‘Mid Scots’ quotations. But the index has not been set up like this so such an approach is not currently possible. After discussing this matter we agreed to not proceed with the ‘contains areas’ approach for now, which is a relief.
I was then able to acti on the other feedback I’d received to make updates to the work I’d done last week. I fixed the issue with the ‘back to search results’ option when loading an entry from the search results not taking selected filters into consideration. This should now work as intended. On request, I set the map to open in a new tab, but I personally don’t like this this. Different tabs are not very obvious on mobile phones and we’re forcing users to open the map in a new tab, whereas with a regular link they always have the option of opening it in a new tab if they want. Also, if you’re consulting the map to then perform searches by selecting a region in the map your search then runs in the new tab, then if you press the ‘open map’ button again you get yet another new tab and you can very easily end up with lots of DSL tabs open without meaning to. It’s all a bit messy. I personally prefer to let users to choose to use new tabs themselves if they want. I also moved the ‘open map’ button in the Advanced Search form, to hopefully make it clearer that it’s not the ‘Search’ button.
I was also asked to restrict the region filter to 1700-present only, but I didn’t proceed with this as my concern is that ‘Both’ is the default and I suspect lots of people won’t bother changing the coverage, meaning they may never even notice the region filter exists. I was also asked to make the region filter be cleared in the Advanced Search when ‘Before 1700’ is selected, but I didn’t do this either, as it means if someone has spent time selecting multiple regions and then switches to ‘Before 1700’ and then swaps to ‘1700-present’ their selections are all lost. Instead what I did was to ensure that if ‘Before 1700’ is selected and the search form is submitted no selected regions are passed on.
I updated the results page so that when only one result is found the results page now displays, rather than opening the entry directly. I also updated the Region filter in the results so it now has ‘Regions’ as a header, and I fixed a bug displaying a double comma in the header for quotations searches. I also added the text ‘Entry’ to the POS filter labels and ensured that if a POS filter is applied in the Advanced Search form, only those POS that were chosen appear in the results filter, even if other parts of speech are present in some of the entries in the results. I also updated the map so that if a search term is present when you load the map, it now continues to be present if you select a region to search through the map interface.
With these updates in place I could then focus on going through my ‘To Do’ list and checking off other items on it. A big change I implemented was to remove ‘Older Scots’ from the site menu and to rename ‘Modern Scots’ to ‘Home’. I also changed the navigation menu from tabs to ‘pills’ as the tab design didn’t really work any more as entry pages (the bulk of the site) no longer have an active menu tab. I also slightly reworked the footer to add in a ‘Make a donation’ button (which links through to the ‘Support us’ page) and I fixed the ‘Download results’ option to ensure the POS displays. I also spotted that a full description of the selected search options (including filters) needed to be updated based on the new URL structures and filter options so have updated this too.
Finally, I made a number of tweaks to the search results, entry and bibliography pages. If an advanced search for both dictionaries only gives results for one dictionary the other dictionary now appears with zero results in the Search Results tab on the entry page, and when one dictionary is searched, the link to search the other dictionary in the ‘Results’ tab now links to the homepage or the DOST page. I have replaced ‘Modern Scots’ and ‘Older Scots’ with the new labels throughout the site and I’ve removed the ‘Show/hide etymology’ button the entry header. Also, the dictionary names in the entry and bibliography headers are now links to the info about the respective dictionary.
I also spent a bit of time working on the HiMuJe Malabar project. Renu had sent me some new, more detailed GeoJSON data for five areas around the Malabar coast. One of these proved to be a little tricky, as the map is only set up to feature one polygon per location and it contained four separate polygons. Thankfully I was able to use the QGIS package and some advice here: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/386382/merge-several-polygons-features-into-one-continuous-area-not-working to merge the separate polygons into one. There were still a few random lines left over in the boundaries between the kingdoms, but I was then able to delete these by importing the updated geojson into https://geojson.io where I could easily remove them. This then gave me one single polygon for the whole of Malabar. I then replaced the existing polygons on the map with the new versions and set the maximum zoom level of the map to 10, rather than 14, which was its previous setting. It’s definitely looking a lot better, as you can see in the following screenshot:
Also this week I responded to a further query from Sara Pons-Sanz about her AHRC application, I spoke to Faidon about the migration of the Iona Place-names site and I fixed an issue with the Historical Thesaurus search facilities that someone had contacted us about. I also had my PDR session on Tuesday and this went very well.
I continued with the new developments for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language for the first three days of this week, during which time I managed to complete a first version of the new search and results filtering facilities for parts of speech and regions, which is a great milestone to reach.
I reordered the parts of speech in the Advanced Search form so that the most common parts (e.g. noun, verb) are listed first. I updated the map so that search icons appear beside regions in the right-hand box whenever a region is selected, with the search icon disappearing when a region is deselected. It took quite some time to get this working in all cases, as regions can be selected in several different ways (e.g. clicking on the map, selecting from the drop-down list, searching), but I think I’ve got it all sorted now. When you press on one of these search icons the Advanced Search form loads with ‘Quotations’ selected and the relevant region / dialect area selected in the list. I did wonder about the map automatically representing any regions entered into the advanced search form when the map button in the form is pressed, but unfortunately this isn’t going to be possible (at least not without a lot of reworking), as any number of disparate regions may be entered into the search form and the map is set up to only display one region and its intersects at a time.
I then started to work on the search results filter for POS in a headword search. This has required some further major reworking of the API both the implement the filtering and to deal with POS passed in the URLs, but an initial version is now working. I can’t share any screenshots for now, but the POS filter works by listing all of the parts of speech found in the results, each with a count of the number of results that match. As entries may have multiple POS these counts in total can be higher than the total number of results, and the filters may also therefore include POS that are beyond any filters applied via the POS selector in the Advanced Search form.
What I wasn’t sure about as I worked on this is what should happen to the display of POS filters and their counts when another filter has been selected. When a date filter is applied I’m fairly certain what should happen: the POS filters and counts update to reflect the filtered data. E.g. if the headwords are filtered to show only those that were first attested between 1700 and 1800 then the POS filter options should be updated to reflect these results.
But what should happen when one or more POS filters are selected? In my initial tests what happened was that the filter is executed and the new POS options reflect the currently applied filter. E.g. filtering the results to first attested between 1700 and 1800, and also filtered to only display only verbs. The POS filter and counts are also updated based on this further filter to the data so only showed POS and counts that were contained within the verb filter. However, this didn’t seem all that useful.
I reckoned we had two possible options: Firstly, when a POS filter is applied, the other POS filter options and counts are updated to reflect the currently filtered results (my initial approach); secondly, when a POS filter is applied the other POS filter options and counts are taken from the results without a POS filter applied.
I decided that the second option made more sense, as the first does wasn’t actually working as you might expect anyway, due to the POS filters being joined by OR. For example, a results set lists 76 nouns and 37 verbs. If you select ‘verb’ and press ‘update’ the results are limited to the 37 entries that are verbs. The noun filter count is updated to 21, as 21 of the 37 verb entries are also nouns. BUT, if you then select ‘noun’ in addition to ‘verb’ and press ‘update’ your results are currently not limited to 21. What happens is the filter is re-run to find all entries that are either verbs OR nouns (or both) and you end up with 76 nouns and 37 verbs selected in the filters and 92 results, rather more than the 21 you might have expected.
If we went with option 2, after selecting ‘verb’ and limiting the results to 37, the ‘noun’ count would still be 76 and not 21, and when pressed on would give the expected results, which seemed more like the expected behaviour to me. I therefore redeveloped the POS filter to go with option two, and whilst doing so I also slightly tweaked the layout of the filter box to divide the sections up.
With this in place I then moved onto implementing the region filters. Previously we didn’t have a ‘filter results’ option for quotation searches and I added this in. giving the option to filter the results by dates of quotation and /or region. This required further major updates to the API to incorporate these new options, but all is in place now. When I came to displaying the various regions in the results filter box I decided to use the same dropdown list widget as in the advanced search form, as there can be lots of listed regions. I also decided to place all region filters in one list rather than separate ones for geographical and dialect areas (as we have in the Advanced Search form) as this distinction isn’t evident in the listed quotes, so I figured just having them altogether would make more sense.
If a search brings back more results than we allow, the numbers for each region reflect the full results to enable the user to tell which region filters might help to being the number down to something more manageable. However, one thing that initially confused me is that the counts in the region filter would appear to be well below the total number of results when searching both dictionaries. This is because regions only apply to SND, so and DOST entries in the results have no regions. Note that if you only search DOST the region filter does not appear on the results page.
I realised that if you combine a date and region search it’s possible that your selected region will not be present in the quotations for the dates specified. E.g. ‘dre*’ limited to 1900-1950 with ‘Western Islands’ selected finds nothing as there are no ‘Western Islands’ quotes in the chosen period. In such cases the selected region will be ignored and the result will default to the date filter. I also updated the headword POS and date combination to work in the same way.
I also updated the search results header so that POS and region selections entered into the Advanced Search form are now reflected in the search results heder. E.g. “Quotation search, 1700 – 1800, Glasgow.” or “Headword search, noun, verb.”.
The quotation search (as you’d expect) searches quotations. The API then parcels these up by entry and the results are displayed by entry. But the underlying data is individual quotations. The filter counts currently display the number of matching quotations NOT the number of matching entries, as the filter counts come directly from the underlying data. So for example, a regions search may feature Edinburgh in the filters with a count of 36 next to it when there are only 32 results. This is because some of the entries in the results have more than one ‘Edinburgh’ quotation. I wasn’t sure whether this would be confusing, or whether the counts should instead relate to entries not quotes. However, the DSL team think this is ok as it is.
So I think that’s the new DSL search and filter facilities just about complete now and my gigantic ‘to do’ list now has a pleasing number of ‘[DONE]’ items in it. Next week I’ll start on the site structure and interface updates, of which there are many.
I spent most of Thursday this week preparing for this year’s PDR session, which I’ll be having next Tuesday, and I spent most of Friday developing the CMS for Craig Lamont’s Scottish Life Writing project. I’m about half-way through implementing this, and I hope to finish it next Monday.
Also this week, I gave some further feedback to Sara Pons-Sanz about her AHRC application, responded to some queries for the HiMuJe Malabar project, discussed migrating the Iona place-names site to our third-party host with Faidon, had a bit of an email catchup with the Place-names of Armagh people and discussed Tom Bartlett’s site migration with Luca, who has very kindly arranged to take over this task as he thinks he’ll be able to get it sorted before the November deadline.
I spent most of my time this week working on the redevelopment of the Dictionaries of the Scots Language website. We’re intending to launch a new version of the resource with a new interface and lots of additional functionality in November and I have a huge amount to do before then.
Whilst working on my gigantic list of things to do I realised that the fulltext search excluding quotations on our test site was not working as intended. Rather than excluding quotations it was in fact searching the entire text of entries and giving the same results as the ‘include quotations’ search. It turned out that this was due to the major changes to the entry structure that were introduced a while back.
My script that processed the data to generate the ‘no quotes’ field in our Solr index should have stripped all the <cit> content from the XML and storing the rest in the ‘withoutquotes’ field that is then indexed by Solr, but it was not stripping any content because the structure of the files has changed (e.g. <cits>, <citGrp>) and it’s only looking for <cit> directly within <sense>. At the time the structural changes were made I updated the <cit> processing elsewhere in my scripts (e.g. when generating data for the quotation search and generating date information) but unfortunately overlooked this part.
I therefore updated my processing script so it could deal with the new structure and re-ran the Solr index generation, which thankfully worked. Once the online Solr index was updated with the new version the search then worked as intended. Thank goodness I spotted this before the relaunch!
I then moved onto implementing the part of speech search, which we eventually decided should only be offered for headword searches. I can’t share any screenshots of this for the moment, but I updated the Advanced Search form to include a list of parts of speech as checkboxes, allowing multiple POS to be selected.
Processing this and dealing with the POS passed in a URL from the search form to the search results page required quite a bit of reworking of the search results page, as I needed to shift the elements found in the URL around to make space for the passed POS (and also region, which I added in later in the week). This required a major reworking of the results page and how it processed URLs, which took quite some time to implement. I also needed to make a lot of changes to the API in order to incorporate the POS search, which took a lot of time and effort too.
Thankfully with all of these changes in place the POS search was operational, and I also updated the Advanced Search form so that any previously selected POS were remembered when refining a search.
With this in place I then moved onto implementing the region search. This only appears when a ‘quotation’ search is selected, and only appears when the coverage is set to ‘both’ or ‘after 1700 (as regions are not found in the DOST data). Initially I tried to list the regions as checkboxes, as with POS, but there were just too many of them for this option to be suitable. Instead I used a multiple select box widget (https://select2.org/getting-started/basic-usage/) that Vasilis had suggested to me which allows multiple regions to be selected and managed in a compact and easy to use manner.
As with POS, I needed to make lots of changes to the results page and the API to incorporate the region search options, and I needed to ensure that any selected regions are remembered and are preselected when returning to the search results form. It took a lot of time and effort to get all of this working, but by the end of the week I had both the POS and region searches working on our test instance, which I reckon is a pretty major achievement.
There’s still a lot to do, such as integrating the map into the region search and ensuring that selected POS and regions are listed in the results header. I also still need to work on results filtering for POS and region, which I’m hoping to get started on next week.
I also spent a fair amount of time on Monday writing up my notes from the conference, submitting my expenses and other such administrative tasks. I also helped Eleanor Lawson with a query about Google Analytics for the SpeechStar website, gave some feedback on a new version of the place-names AHRC proposal for Jayne Carroll at Nottingham and spoke to Faidon about the migration of websites to our external provider.
On Thursday I also had an online meeting with Tom Bartlett about migrating his podcast site https://languagepowerpodcast.org/ from its current host SquareSpace to hosting provided by the University. The current subscription period expires in November, and I don’t have the time to migrate the site before then so we’re exploring some options.
I took Monday and Friday off this week and on Wednesday and Thursday I attended the Digital Humanities Congress in Sheffield, meaning I only had one day to spend on regular work this week. I spent most of this writing a specification document for the database and CMS for the Scottish Life Writing project, which I sent off to PI Craig and RA Emily for feedback. I also had a further chat about the new search and results filtering options for the DSL.
I also spent a bit of time fixing a few bugs that I’d spotted in my recent updates to the HiMuJe Malabar map. Category labels in the legend were getting duplicated when switching between menus in the map (e.g. ‘Area’ would become ‘AreaArea’), and I managed to fix this. I’d also spotted that the categorisation type was getting removed from the URL when switching between menus, which meant that bookmarking or citing the page didn’t give the correct categorisation. I managed to fix this too. Finally, I’d spotted that loading a travel route stage from a URL into a fresh browser or browser tab meant that the map didn’t zoom to the stage’s location but instead displayed the full extent of the route. This was because the code to position the map to the full extent was still running when the code to zoom to a specific location was triggered, meaning the latter did not take effect. I fixed this by adding in a delay. There is now a brief pause between the route loading in and then the map zooming to the chosen stage, which I think works quite well.
It was great to attend the conference in Sheffield and I attended a lot of interesting sessions (see https://www.dhi.ac.uk/dhc/2026/), a lot of which involved discussions of AI, which is having as huge impact on digital humanities research at the moment. The opening plenary talk discussed ‘Literary Criticism after Large Language Models’. The speaker noted that LLMs can produce a close reading of texts in seconds, but discussed whether this can actually ever be considered literary criticism or is it just imitation, and is there actually a difference? Can it be considered criticism if there’s no understanding behind it?
The speaker gave an interesting overview of the stages of the use of computers in the humanities, starting with concordances and indexes in the 50s to the 90s, the emergence of distant reading in the 2000s, the shift to algorithmic criticism and interpretative visualisation in the 2010s and in the 2020s a major shift to using LLMs to interpret text – no longer just counting words and visualising but interpreting texts too.
The speaker pointed out the criticism involves interpretation (extracting meaning), surprise (new insights), context (historical and cultural), revision (deciding what is relevant) and reproducibility. He discussed a study that compared how GPT-4 and humans can interpret metaphors, and how the AI was pretty effective, but whether this was from generalising or interpreting from existing knowledge. Another study looked at authorship and genre in short passages and LLMs performed very well, with Llama 38b proving to be the best in this study. The speaker then discussed a test he carried out on a poetry magazine corpus that he created and asked GPT-5 to analyse. This was a new corpus so the LLM had no prior knowledge and consisted of around 1300 poems. So this was ‘blind corpus analysis’ with no existing or contextual knowledge. He asked the LLM to identify formal, stylistic, thematic, rhetorical and linguistic patterns to formulate a critical account of the collection. The results were good, with genuine insights and the results could plausibly appear in literary scholarship. He pointed out that LLMs can perform corpus level criticism but tend towards overcoherence, but can revise when challenged. He also pointed out that everything the LLM does is heavily prompt dependent – the AI only ever does what is specifically asked – a human critic is still absolutely needed.
The speaker concluded by stating that criticism is a text about a text – it is an accountable act of reading and LLMs can do this. He stated that there is ‘genuine’ (human) versus ‘false’ (AI) interpretation, but that the dividing line between the two is very thing now and wondered what forms of criticism will become more viable when plausible readings are cheap.
For the first parallel session I chose session 1, which involved three talks about AI. The first looked at creating handwritten text recognition (HTR) for complex manuscripts using generative AI in the context of the Newton Project (https://newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/). This has been around since 1998 and currently incudes around 12 million words of transcribed text. They have a new project launching in 2027 which will digitise three books such as the Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. These works have a lot of mathematics in them and are not uniform documents, including lots of hands, tables, diagrams, revisions, calculations and both Latin and English text. The manuscripts are already digitised and are available in IIIF hosted at Cambridge Digital Library. The speaker sampled 5% of the manuscript (around 80 pages) to evaluate the document using a 5-tier system. 19% were evaluated as being extremely difficult to transcribe with only 6% being easy.
The speaker had experimented with Transkribus and wanted to compare this to more general AI tools (Leo AI and Gemini). She picked out four pages at different tiers to test, performing a line-by-line comparison of the tools. For a tier-2 page (pretty easy) Leo performed best, followed by Gemini then Transkribus. For a tier-4 page (difficult) Transkribus failed, Leo quit mid-way through and Gemini started to give summaries. The speaker updated the prompt, which improved things but the results were still not highly accurate. The speaker noted that as Transkribus works line by line it does not work so well whereas the AI tools take the whole page into consideration.
The speaker focussed on Gemini and created a detailed prompt with lots of instructions and developed a tool using Claude Sonnet that can be used to evaluated and correct HTR output (see https://johedesan.github.io/newt/).
The second speaker discussed marking up historical texts using AI. He used data from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey project (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/). This was manually annotated using XML tags to note who did what, sentencing and other things. The speaker wanted to investigate how AI could do this now, given prompts and examples. He used the a locally installed instance of Qwen AI to perform the tests. It did well, but there were some issues. The output specified was not a conversational response, so there weren’t any hallucinations and he set it up with a ‘head’ using the spaCy NLP tool. This was able to pick out defendants, victims and verdicts from trial documents. He stated that the tools found assigning the correct verdict to be hard as this often appears at the end of the text and is tricky when there are multiple people. Long trials are also tricky.
The third speaker discussed person identification in historical correspondence using an LLM. The data was the Hammer-Purgstall correspondence (https://gams.uni-graz.at/hpe) which features 3545 transcribed letters. This started with a print edition that was converted to TEI, although the semantic annotation is incomplete. The project used the CorrespSearch webservice (https://correspsearch.net).
The project had to deal with many issues such as deciding on the boundaries for annotation (what should be included in the annotation) , dealing with tables, working out who pronouns refer to, and issues with families and groups. Also people with mononyms, issues with different people with the same name (e.g. fathers and sons). The project used an LLM as it could make use of context and works with multiple languages. As the project didn’t want the LLM to mess with the XML the output was not updated XML but a series of positions where the relevant tokens start and end.
The results of the tests were compared to human annotation. AI tests were carried out using GPT-5, Claude 5 and Qwen 3.5 and the tools were able to extract 68% of the names. It took humans 13 hours to process the data but the AI tools only took 20-35 minutes.
For the next parallel session I chose Session 5, which was mostly focussed on GIS and mapping. The first speaker discussed visualising the historical evolution of urban form using GIS. The speaker used ArcGIS to analyse maps of colonial Calcutta over 100 years. She looked at street sinuosity and street width to compare colonial centres to indigenous areas , and also ‘non-plot’ areas (areas in transition without formal buildings). She created colour coded clusters based on these criteria (e.g. wide, straight, very low non-plot) to show the character of districts, comparing this to historical data and also showing how the situation changed through various different maps over 100 years.
The second speaker looked at land reclamation in 19th century Denmark based on historical documents that were available as PDFs. The speaker used an LLM as it could work well with Danish. This was able to extract coordinates and create georeferenced data that could then be searched.
The third speaker discussed geoparsing data found in archaeological records such as field reports – ‘grey literature’ that is otherwise difficult to extract data from. The project developed a tool to work out which places are mentioned in the texts. This is a two-part process involving recognition (finding places in the texts) and resolution (working out what the place actually is). The latter needs the most work. NER tools can struggle, e.g. when multiple places share the same name such as Memphis in the US and Memphis in Egypt. The speaker discussed how the project’s tool creates a ‘bounding box’ to work out which places are likely correct based on the proximity of other named places in the text. Further information can be found here: https://cloud.gate.ac.uk/.
Day 2 of the conference began with more parallel sessions, and I chose to attend Session 7. The first speaker talked about the digitisation and study of marginalia. He pointed out the marginalia were once frowned upon and attempts were sometimes made to remove them, such as through chemical erasure, but they are now of great interest. He presented the work of a project called Magic (https://www.magic.unina.it/en) that is attempting to read these marginalia using modern technology. The project uses FITS images that have embedded metadata and runs processes to reduce things like bleed-through to enhance the visibility of the notes – processes that also help with HTR.
The second speaker discussed the Law Versus Practice project (https://www.lawvpractice.ie/), which extracts data about women and property ownership in early modern Ireland. It is creating biographical profiles of women from many primary sources, such as the list of claims, which contains 3,100 claims. The data is fairly standardised, tabular data that is mostly printed, although there are inconsistencies, omissions and errors. The speaker pointed out that disambiguation was an issue and needed research using titles, parentage, dates and geography. This was tricky for women due to marriage and name changes. The project has extracted over 5000 unique people that are linked to places, although the latter is often incomplete.
The third speaker discussed slavery in the Dutch East India Archive (see https://voices.iisg.nl/). The project alanysed 7.5 million pages of transcriptions from the archive, mainly focussing on early modern Asia and mapped slave voyages. HTR was carried out by a tool called Loghi (https://github.com/knaw-huc/loghi-htr) with linguistic analysis using AntConc. The speaker noted that the transcriptions were not perfect but were good enough for searching and finding the co-occurrence of slave-related terms using AntConc. Around 800 terms were analysed, including spelling variants.
The next session I attended as Session 10, and the first speaker was Jeremy Smith, who gave a fascinating talk about religious vocabulary in the 17th century, using the ‘quads’ concept from the Linguistic DNA project and data from EEBO-TCP. He talked specifically about evidence from the (mostly religious) works of Lucy Hutchinson. He discussed how the phrase ‘infinite love’ was not scriptural but became commonplace during this period. He also discussed ‘saving faith’, a term which also appeared during this period.
The second speaker discussed how ideas travel in published works, mapping the influence of John Locke in the 18th century through direct quotation, paraphrase, concepts, critique, adaptation and appropriation. The vocabulary can change so the speaker investigated connections using semantic similarity across 32 million pages in ECCO using 100-token chunks to investigate twenty high-use Locke quotes. The third speaker discussed identifying essay-length republication in books and newspapers in the 18th century, looking at the work of David Hume.
For the final parallel session I attended Session 13. The first speaker discussed news consumption, social media and youth engagement in Portugal. The speaker pointed out how social media is now the gateway for news, either intentionally or incidentally, and how young people are more disengaged with other media. There is no stable relationship with a specific new brand and engagement is formed through algorithmically curated feeds that shape an image of the world, including exposure to misinformation and propaganda. The speaker looked at people aged 15-29 in Portugal using focus groups and questionnaires. The data consisted of around 1500 responses, with more female than male participants, with most from the older age groups having higher education. 53% used social media for news daily, with TV news at 25% and newspapers 17%. The respondents viewed traditional media as being more trustworthy, but social media also includes traditional news accounts as well as influencers and amateur news accounts.
The second speaker discussed propaganda and linguistic divergence in Russian online discourse during the war in Ukraine. She discussed linguistic variation across state and social media, with social media more focussed on mobilisation and disinformation while state media focussed on pacifying the population and normalisation.
The third speaker gave an overview of preparations for a study of zeitgeist in UK parliamentary debates, looking at the period from Callaghan, Thatcher and Major (1976-1997). The project will use the Hansard corpus.
The final session of the conference was a roundtable discussion about Digital Humanities in a changing higher education landscape and discussions covered the position of DH at a time when funding is increasingly hard to come by, and the role of AI in DH research.
The conference was hugely interesting and featured some great speakers, lots of interesting research and some interesting challenges. It was really great to be able to attend.
This week I continued with the interactive map for the HiMuJe Malabar project and made some good progress with its development. All subtypes now have an associated icon that is used on the map when the ‘type/subtype’ categorisation is selected, and I also reworked the colours of these, as you can see in the following screenshot:
After last week’s frustrations with the map legend, I reworked it to divide it a little better into sections by type, which you can also see in the above screenshot. When a location popup is opened the corresponding subtype icon also now appears in the popup header. I also added an option to the ‘Home’ menu to make all marker labels permanently visible on the map (until you turn them off again). With all locations on this does clutter up the map, but I think it’s a useful option for people who are looking for a place but aren’t entirely sure where it is. With labels on you can see the names of all places without having to hover over each marker in turn. This works better when the map is filtered in the legend. I also intentionally set the map so that I you set the labels to on and open the travel route menu the labels are removed as the travel routes would be very difficult to see with the labels on.
I also updated the colours for the other categorisation types to hopefully make them work a little better. When the ‘number of references’ categorisation is selected the marker colours are now a gradient. It’s also now possible to cite a specific stage in a travel route. This appears in the citation text, e.g. “HiMuJe Malabar Digital Map: Watercolor map, travel routes menu, showing the travel route ‘Brahmins’, with unrelated places hidden, viewing stage 2 of the route, placenames categorised by language. 2026. In HiMuJe Malabar. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. Retrieved 28 August 2026 and following URL opens the route at Stage 2. This option will mean I’ll be able to update the location popup to add a new tab that lists all of the stages in routes that the place appears in, and give links to each of these. I haven’t done this yet, though.
Also this week I spent quite some time working for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language. This included attending an online meeting to discuss the structure of the new site, at which some fairly major revisions to the new design were proposed. I also engaged in a couple of email conversations about the updates that still need to be undertaken before the hopefully launch the new site later this year. In preparation for all of this work I also went back through all of my emails from the DSL team and my notes to create a bit ‘to do’ list containing everything that needs done. It’s going to be a busy couple of months.
Also this week I met with Craig Lamont and his RA Emily Hay to discuss the Life Writing project. They’re going to be compiling a bibliography of Scottish life writing and I’m going to develop the systems for this. I did look into using existing bibliography software but nothing I looked at did exactly what they are after so I’m going to create a simple CMS for them to use myself, with a front-end consisting of search and browse options and a map interface sometime next year. I spent a bit of time after the meeting going through the sample spreadsheet they had prepared and sending a list of questions about the data.
I also met with Deven Parker this week to discuss an AHRC proposal she’s involved with. I can’t say too much about this, but it’s related to the work we’re doing on the playbills and I would be involved in some technical capacity. I also had a chat with Garrick Allen about a proposal he’s trying to get funding for after an earlier AHRC submission was unsuccessful. I read through the documentation and gave feedback, and I’ve also put Garrick in touch with my colleague Luca Guariento who is probably going to provide the technical assistance.
Other tasks I carried out this week included investigating an issue with the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (which turned out to be an issue with the data and not the system), making some final tweaks to the Burns Supper Map before the project RA finished working on the project, and generating some Books and Borrowing data for a publication Katie Halsey is working on.
I continued to work on the DOST Auld Laws project on Monday and Tuesday this week. My first task was to implement the tag selection for the Advanced Search. As discussed last week, this section allows users to either include or exclude tags from their searches, or limit their search to only look at the contents of one of more specified tags. Luca has already created the XML search options that would allow this, and my job was therefore to process the user’s selections, format the query and connect to the XML. I managed to complete this on Monday and it’s now possible to construct a query such as “find all occurrences of words beginning ‘ȝe’ in ‘Edzell Doouments’ excluding any text found in ‘Expanded Forms’, Aitken Notes and Other Notes”. It’s also possible to press on the ‘Refine your search’ button to return to the search form and the search criteria will be remembered in the form. I also added in a ‘Clear’ button.
I continued working on the site on Tuesday. I added a ‘Cite’ option to the search result page, which allows users to share or cite a particular page of a search, including the ordering. I also added a help popup about the tag selection to the search form and I integrated the ‘show all Aitken notes’ query with the Advanced Search. This is a special case that returns the full contents of all notes by Aitken across all or a selection of documents without the need to supply any search text. Information about how to do this appears in the help popup as follows:
“To retrieve all Aitken Notes enter a dash (-) into the search box, select documents (if required), set Aitken Notes to Limit to content in this tag and press the search button. This will display the full contents of all Aitken notes in your chosen documents.”
The Aitken Note results are a bit different to the regular results as they return the full contents of each tag, not a KWIC. Therefore all of the text is highlighted in yellow and the sorting by left and right of the term doesn’t do anything, as there is nothing left or right.
Whilst working on the Advanced Search I’d spotted that the advanced search KWIC (KeyWord In Context) was not crossing line boundaries, meaning that when a work is found at the beginning of a line no contextual text is returned before this. This is different to the Quick Search, which ignores line boundaries and is not ideal, as it means the search results are inconsistent and the quick search actually gives better results than the advanced search. Thankfully Luca was able to find a solution to this and to make the advanced search results consistent with the quick search.
I’ve now pretty much done all I can do for this project until I hear back from Joanna, who is going to supply ancillary content and edited XML files.
I spent a lot of the rest of the week working on the HiMuJe Malabar project, continuing to develop the map. On Thursday I attended a meeting with Ophira, Renu and project Co-I Ines, who is in Glasgow from Germany for a while to work on the project. We had a very productive meeting and we now have a much clearer idea about how the travel routes and other aspects of the map will function.
In terms of actual development of the map, this week I fixed an issue with the travel routes whereby when multiple travel routes are selected, deselecting one would remove all locations, even those that were associated with another active route. This took quite some time to sort out, unfortunately, but it’s fixed now and the routes work a lot better.
I then set about making it possible to share or cite the selected travel routes, also noting whether unrelated places have been hidden or not. This required some major reworking of the code to ensure that these options are added to the URL and when the page loads that the options are taken from the URL and processed. The citation text also needed to include information about the selections too, and any location selected when the route is active can also be cited, e.g.
“HiMuJe Malabar Digital Map: Satellite map, travel routes menu, showing the travel route ‘The migration of Jews and Christians in the Qissa’, with unrelated places hidden, placenames categorised by type / subtype, placename record for Mecca. 2026. In HiMuJe Malabar. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. Retrieved 19 August 2026”
At the meeting we decided what icons to use for the location categorisation so on Friday I returned to the map legend to rework this. I started off by slightly reworking the data to ensure that all locations had both a type and a subtype, as a few locations only had the former. This meant creating a new ‘Area’ type and making ‘Region’ a subtype of this, whereas previously ‘Region’ was the type. The reason for doing this is so that the legend could be grouped by type, giving each type a count of the total number of locations contained across all subtypes and to include a checkbox for each type that when pressed on would select and deselect all subtypes.
That was the plan, anyway, but unfortunately I had a very frustrating day and didn’t manage to get this working by the end of it. The difficulty is that Leaflet generates and processes the legend internally based on the map layers and trying to hook into this and change the default behaviour is very difficult. I managed to get the ‘Type’ checkboxes to select and deselect all corresponding ‘Subtype’ checkboxes but doing so was not actually triggering any changes on the map – the corresponding map layers were not being affected when the checkboxes changed even though manually pressing on the checkboxes did trigger the layer change. I’m afraid I ran out of time with this and didn’t manage to find a solution. For now the types are just headings in the legend without associated checkboxes, which is a bit of a shame but I just don’t have the time at the moment to look into this further.
Also this week I made a few more tweaks to the data for the Burns Supper Map, including adding in a new batch of images, discussed migrating a couple of sites to our third-party hosting supplier, read a document ahead of next week’s DSL meeting and read some information Deven Parker had sent me about a funding bid.
I was back in Glasgow and back to a five-day working week this week, as the summer holiday period drew to a close. I spent a fair amount of time this week continuing to work on the DOST Auld Laws project. Luca has been working on the XML queries I’d specified for the advanced search and I was able to test them out and give feedback on them. These are mostly all working as I’d hoped, which is really great, and I was able to begin working on the front-end aspects of the advanced search, with the aim of connecting all of this into the queries Luca had created.
However, I also had to spend quite a bit of time working with the source files, as the project PI Joanna Kopaczyk-McPherson had realised that two of the eight documents should really be split up into smaller sections. This was no straightforward task, as not only did it require the XML documents to be split into smaller sections, but many other aspects needed to be updated. The document IDs needed to be changed, which mean IDs used for image filenames throughout the documents also needed to be changed, with the filenames of the actual images also then needing to be updated too. For page navigation in the site data is stored in a database and this also needed to be updated, and the XML files stored in eXist for search purposes also needed to be updated. There were twelve steps I needed to follow for each required split, which took some time, but thankfully the process went pretty smoothly and we ended up with 13 documents in the site instead of the original 8.
There were further issues to come, as Joanna has now noticed that the documents need further edits and tweaks, and not just minor changes to text but structural issues such as the insertion of omitted lines. This is going to be very difficult to do as lines are linked to coordinates in the images, which was all handled via the Transkribus tool. We exported the XML files from Transkribus month ago and many major changes have been made to the files since the export so it’s not going to be possible to re-import them. Manually creating new lines in the XML files as they are now will not have the connections through to coordinates in the corresponding image files, so we’ll end up with inconsistent data. It’s not a great situation to be in, and ideally all editing of the documents should have been completed in Transkribus before we exported the files, something I’d mentioned back when I undertook the export process months ago. We haven’t reached a decision on how best to handle this yet and we’ll continue to discuss the options next week.
Despite all of this I did manage to work on the advanced search, creating the advanced search form which, as specified, features a textbox where you can enter some text, a list of documents from which you have the option of selecting the ones you’re interested in and a list of tags that you can either include, exclude or limit your search to, as you can see in the following screenshot:
As of yet I have not implemented the tag limits, but the limit by documents is operational. This connects through to Luca’s new eXist-db queries to perform a search limited by documents and as with the quick search, you can also sort the results by words to the left and right of the term, although I’ll need to get Luca to look into how the KWIC is generated for the advanced search results as they don’t seem to cross line boundaries, unlike the quick search. The advanced search results display information about the documents you’ve selected and if you press on a search result to load the corresponding page the link back to the search results takes you to the right place. There’s still lots to do. The limit by tags is the biggest thing and will probably take quite some time. I also still need to add in an option to cite a specific search result page and add in an option to refine your search, which will remember the options you previously filled in when you return to the search form. An option to clear the search also needs to be added. I’ll continue with this next week.
Also this week I participated in two meetings about the place-names AHRC proposal I’m involved with, and this is coming together very well. We now have an outline proposal completed and pretty much ready for submission.
I also spent a bit of time continuing with the travel routes for the HiMuJe Malabar project, adding in a few more travel routes that had been prepared and made a few tweaks to the XSLT that generates the entry HTML for the new DSL interface, fixing some issues with the layout of the new ‘combs’ sections.
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.