TheGlasgowStory

As told by some of Scotland's best writers, and illustrated with thousands of images from the collections of the city's world-famous libraries, museums and universities. From football to fashions, Auchenshuggle to Yoker, you'll find it all here. Find out more

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

The Berwickshire Place-Name Resource

The resource includes historical research for all Berwickshire place-names on the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 Landranger map, including more than 1,600 place-names and 7,000 historical forms presented via a series of interactive maps. Find out more

Mackintosh Architecture: Context, Making and Meaning

The project provides a richly-illustrated Catalogue of all known architectural projects by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, including over 1200 drawings by Mackintosh and the practice, analytical and contextual essays, a timeline and glossary. Find out more

Consultation Letters of Dr William Cullen (1710-1790) at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

A publicly accessible, online scholarly edition of one of the most important archives of eighteenth-century medical "consultation letters", containing more than 20,000 digitised pages. Find out more

Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue

The Digital Catalogue documents, visually and textually, the first ten years of Andy Goldsworthy's ephemeral, outdoor practice. It replicates Goldsworthy's Slide Cabinet Index, and includes previously unpublished material from Goldsworthy's Sketchbook Diaries. Find out more

People of Medieval Scotland 1093-1371

A database of all known people of Scotland between 1093 and 1314 mentioned in over 8600 contemporary documents. It is also being extended to 1371 to include all those lands, peoples and relationships mentioned in royal charters between 1314 and 1371. Find out more

The Historical Thesaurus of English

The University of Glasgow’s Historical Thesaurus of English is a unique resource charting the development of meaning in the huge and varied vocabulary of English. It consists of almost every recorded word in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, all arranged into detailed hierarchies of meaning. Find out more

James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was a major figure in 19th century printmaking and created 490 etchings. Over 9500 impressions of these prints have been located and investigated during the project, which completes a series of catalogues raisonnés of Whistler's oeuvre. Find out more

The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler: A Catalogue Raisonné

The online catalogue includes some 550 oil paintings and over 1700 works on paper dating from ca 1850 to 1903. The evolution of each painting from sketch to final oil is described and illustrated. Find out more

Week Beginning 26th October 2015

Posted on2nd November 2015

I returned to a more normal working week this week, after having spent the previous one at a conference and the one before that on holiday. I probably spent about a day catching up with emails, submitting my expenses claim and writing last week’s rather extensive conference report / blog post. I also decided it was about time that I gathered all of my outstanding tasks together into one long ‘to do’ list as I seem to have a lot going on at the moment. The list currently has 47 items on it split across more than 12 different projects, not including other projects that will be starting up in the next month or two. There’s rather a lot going on at the moment and it is good to have everything written down in one place so I don’t forget anything. I also had some AHRC review duties to perform this week as well, which took up some further time.

With these tasks out of the way I could get stuck into working on some of my outstanding projects again. I met with Hannah Tweed on Tuesday to go through the Medical Humanities Network website with her. She had begun to populate the content management system with projects and people now and had encountered a few bugs and areas of confusion so we went through the system and I made a note of things that needed fixed. These were all thankfully small issues and all easily fixable, such as supressing the display of fields when the information isn’t available and it was good to get things working properly. I also returned to the SciFiMedHums bibliographical database. I updated the layout of the ‘associated information’ section of the ‘view item’ page to make it look nicer and I created the ‘advanced search’ form, that enables users to search for things like themes, mediums, dates, people and places. I also reworked the search results page to add in pagination, with results currently getting split over multiple pages when more than 10 items are returned. I’ve pretty much finished all I can do on this project now until I get some feedback from Gavin. I also helped Zanne to get some videos reformatted and uploaded to the Academic Publishing website, which will probably be my final task for this project.

Wendy contacted me this week to say that she’d spotted some slightly odd behaviour with the Scots Corpus website. The advanced search was saying that there were 1317 documents in the system but a search returning all of them was saying that it matched 99.92% of the corpus. The regular search stated that there were 1316 documents. We figured out that this was being caused by a request we had earlier this year to remove a document from the corpus. I had figured out a way to delete it but evidently there was some data somewhere that hadn’t been successfully updated. I managed to track this down: it turned out that the number of documents and the total number of words was being stored statically in a database table, and the advanced search was referencing this. Having discovered this I updated the static table and everything was sorted. Wendy also asked me about further updates to the Corpus that she would like to see in place before a new edition of a book goes to the printers in January. We agreed that it would be good to rework the advanced search criteria selection as the options are just too confusing as they stand. There is also a slight issue with the concordance ordering that I need to get sorted too.

At the conference last week Marc, Fraser and I met with Terttu Nevalainen and Matti Rissanen to discuss Glasgow hosting the Helsinki Corpus, which is currently only available on CD. This week I spent some time looking through the source code and getting a bit of server space set aside for hosting the resource. The scripts that power the corpus are Python based and I’ve not had a massive amount of experience with Python, but looking through the source code it all seemed fairly easy to understand. I managed to get the necessary scripts and the data (mostly XML and some plain text) uploaded to the server and the scripts executing. The only change I have so far made to the code is to remove the ‘Exit’ tab as this is no longer applicable. We will need to update some of the site text and also add in a ‘hosted by Glasgow’ link somewhere. The corpus all seems to work online in the same way as it does on the CD now, which is great. The only problem is the speed of the search facilities. The search is very slow, and can take up to 30 seconds to run. Without delving into the code I can’t say why this is the case, but I would suspect it is because the script has to run through every XML file in the system each time the search runs. There doesn’t appear to be any caching or indexing of the data (e.g. using an XML database) and I would imagine that without using such facilities we won’t be able to do much to improve the speed. The test site isn’t publicly accessible yet as I need to speak to Marc about it before we take things further.

Digital Humanities at Glasgow