I mostly divided my time between three projects this week: Playbills, Burns Supper Map and the Place-names of Armagh. Unfortunately I was still suffering from the monstrous cold I started with last week and struggled through some of the week, but I still managed to get quite a lot done.
For the Playbills project I wrote, tested and implemented a script that extracts the data from the JSON versions of the playbill files I generated, splits this up and inserts everything into a relational database. The reason I’m doing this is to make it easier to generate canonical records for venues, plays, performers and roles, as it will be much easier to query the data and track records in a relational database.
The data I’ve extracted consists of 1902 playbill records that feature 6434 plays. These are categorised by one or more of 188 distinct genres (with ‘melodrama’ associated with 2026 plays and ‘melo-drama’ a further 10). I’ve extracted 185 distinct venues, 49498 performers, 49495 roles and 6083 contributors.
As of yet I haven’t done anything to generate canonical records, which will be the next major step, and I need to discuss things with project PI Deven before I proceed with this. For example, the role ‘Macbeth’ appears 27 times, with a further three appearances in other strings (not including ‘Lady Macbeth’) e.g. ‘Macbeth’s Last appearance’. These would need to link to one single canonical ‘Macbeth’ role. Similarly, there are 28 plays that have ‘Macbeth’ somewhere in their title, with variants such as ‘MACBETH, KING OF SCOTLAND’, ‘Macbeth; King of Scotland’, ‘MACBETH, KING OF SCOTLAND.’ In addition to ‘MACBETH’ and ‘Macbeth’ and these would need to link to a single canonical ‘Macbeth’ play.
There’s also some data cleaning that we should perform, e.g. amalgamating data that doesn’t have the same form but should be the same thing. For example, there are a lot of possible duplicates in the ‘Genre’ data. There’s ‘acrobatic’, ‘acrobatic display’, ‘acrobatic performance’ and ‘acrobatics’ all as different genres when presumably these should be the same.
I also still need to work on the performer names to split them into titles, forenames and surnames, and to ascertain gender based on titles. Venues also need some work as there are many that are the same but have slightly different text, e.g. ‘Royal Theatre, Aberdeen’, ‘Theatre Royal, Aberdeen’ and ‘Theatre Royal Aberdeen’. There’s the same issue with printers too, although perhaps this isn’t so important. E.g. ‘Keenes, Kingsmead-Street, Bath’, ‘Keenes, Bath, Kingsmead-Street’ and ‘Keenes, Bath’. It’s possible that we might be able to get some sort of AI processes to help with such tasks.
We’re also going to have to give some thought about how to handle updates to the data. I’m generating canonical records, extracting things like performer gender and generating unique identifiers for things like plays in my database, and I’ll be creating new JSON files that incorporate this new data that will then be ingested into Solr for search purposes. Therefore the data will be quite different to the original YAML files. When updates need to be made should these then be made to the original YAML files, which would necessitate much regeneration of data, or should the updates be made elsewhere, such as through the database? I don’t have an answer to this yet, but it’s something we’ll need to consider.
For the Burns Supper Map project I set up the online database for the supper data and have been working on a script that imports the data from the spreadsheets into this database. I have got everything working for the spreadsheet of the online survey, so my database currently has 308 suppers that include data for 6902 filter options.
What I haven’t been able to do yet is to import the data from the public domain spreadsheet, as this currently contains a lot of inconsistencies in how the data are recorded. The data in the filter columns (“frequency”, “category”, “toast”, “food”, “style”, “drink”, “entertainment”, “poem”, “music”, “dance”, “dress”) must exactly match the options found in the online form for my import script to work. This includes capitalisation / case and ensuring that a semi-colon is used to separate multiple items. I had a meeting with the project RA Cleo on Friday to discuss this, and she’s going to work on tidying things up.
I also wrote a script that posts the address for each record to Google Maps which then returns the latitude and longitude (something we’re going to need in order to pin the records on a map). The user inputted location data can be somewhat variable, as you might imagine, but Google Maps has generally done a very good job at identifying places from the data, and we can always tweak things once we see the locations on the map. I’m hoping to start development of the map next week.
For the Place-names of Armagh project I uploaded a large number of place-names that I’d been sent. We now have 2932 place-names in the system. I also processed the existing historical forms CSV and this has found historical forms for 1056 of these new place-names. The new place-names had additional parishes and baronies that were not already in the system and in such cases these have been created, but there are some issues, as the data appears to be somewhat messy at times and will need some cleaning. For example, there’s a ‘Forkhill’ and a ‘Forkill’ and these may be the same, there are forms with question marks and multiple forms and descriptive text, e.g. ‘Killevy/Partly in Dundonald Parish’ and ‘Armagh?/Eglish?’. These will all need separated out and fixed as required.
I also spent some time updating the CMS to convert the townland field from a textbox to a list, thus enabling multiple townlands to be associated with a place-name and ensuring each townland is only stored once in the system. This involved extracting the townlands from all of the 2932 placename records, splitting forms up that have multiple townlands in ‘x or y’ or ‘x / y’ format, storing the unique townlands and then associating the corresponding ones with each placename record. There are 997 unique townlands (although some of these may need amalgamated) and 3007 connections between townlands and placenames.
I then updated the CMS to replace the existing ‘townland’ textbox with a list of townlands as checkboxes, in the same way as parishes and baronies. We might need to rethink this, though, as scrolling through 997 townlands to find the right ones takes time. I also included an option to add a new townland when adding / editing a placename record as I’m guessing there will be more to come. This should only be used when the townland isn’t already in the list, otherwise we’ll end up with duplicates.
I also made some further updates to the CMS, namely simplifying historical forms so there is just one ‘form’ field rather than separate English and Irish boxes, and adding a flag to record whether the form is a ‘previously suggested form’ or not. I also renamed the ‘Discovery’ maps to ‘1:50,000’ as this is how the maps tend to be referred to.
Also this week I replied to a couple of emails from the DSL people about future developments and I added a new video to the Seeing Speech resource. I also investigated an issue with the Books and Borrowing website and discussed the migration of the resource to a new server with the Stirling IT people, and I generated CSV files for all of the survey answers for Speak For Yersel and sent them on to Janine Illian in Statistics, who Jennifer and I met with last week.
I had a bit of a disrupted week this week, as I started feeling unwell on Tuesday morning and ended up off work sick for the rest of Tuesday and Wednesday. During this time I felt absolutely wiped out and could barely do anything other than sleep, but by Wednesday evening this had developed into a monstrous cold, the likes of which I’ve not had for several years. Thankfully once the symptoms had moved to my nose and throat my head was a bit clearer and I was able to work on Thursday and Friday, but I was still pretty far from feeling 100%.
I spent most of Monday this week preparing for, travelling to and co-presenting a talk about Speak For Yersel at the Edinburgh Futures Institute with Jennifer Smith. The talk went pretty well and it was good to meet some of our linguistics colleagues at Edinburgh, plus others involved with the EFI. I spent some of my other available time reading through and commenting on an AHRC proposal that will involve Glasgow and the Historical Thesaurus that had been sent by Sara Pons-Sanz at Cardiff University, and looking through some further place-name data I’d been sent for the Place-names of Armagh project.
Despite being off work sick on Wednesday I still managed to attend an online meeting for the Burns Supper Map project to discuss the specification document I’d prepared for the project. This was all very positive and there weren’t any major issues that anyone had spotted whilst reading through it.
For the remainder of the week I spent a bit of time investigating some issues that had been encountered when publishing pure xref entries through the Anglo-Norman Dictionary’s management system. Certain cross references were not appearing in the published entries despite being in the XML and a bit of investigation uncovered why. The entries contained cross references to entries that don’t actually exist in the dictionary. For example, Mars_2 references ‘march’, which is not an entry and respundre_2 references ‘repundre’ which is also not an entry (they both need homonym numbers added). When xref entries are published the cross references are extracted and stored, and at this point the system checks that the references are valid, and only links to entries that are valid. It is these that are displayed in the front-end, so even though invalid xrefs may exist in the XML they don’t get displayed. The ‘preview’ generates its view directly from the XML without checking validity, which is why this view doesn’t match the front-end. I ran a check and it turns out that there are around 500 xref entries that include a reference to an entry that doesn’t exist, and I passed these onto the editor who will get these sorted.
On Friday I met with Jennifer and Janine Illian, who is the current Head of Statistics, to discuss the Speak For Yersel data and what kind of additional statistical analysis might be possible. Janine is particularly interested in spatial modelling and has a keen interest in linguistics and it was really great to hear her thoughts about the Speak For Yersel data. I’m going to send her the data for all survey responses next week so she can experiment with it, and we’ve arranged to meet again later this month.
I spent the rest of my available time this week working on Deven Parker’s Playbills project, working with the YAML files, figuring out how these might be imported into Solr and how we can extract canonical records for things like venues from them. It turns out that Solr can’t index YAML files (at least not without creating a custom data importer), which is a bit of a surprise. This isn’t a major issue, though, as I can convert them to JSON, although this also proved to be trickier than I’d anticipated. Normally I’d use PHP to process data, but PHP also can’t read YAML files, at least not without installing extensions and this process seemed far too convoluted to bother with. Instead I used Python to convert the files, but this involved a bit of trial and error as I’m not used to Python and it’s bizarre insistence on whitespace being important, and the fact that if you mix up spaces and tabs to create this whitespace the scripts fall over. I got there in the end, though.
The bigger issue I encountered was with the unit of data that gets indexed. I’d previously said that we’d index entire playbill files and use ‘playbill’ as the smallest item that gets returned in the search results, but it turns out there are some problems with this, and I think indexing individual plays is going to work better. I’m still experimenting with the data and Solr’s capabilities, but initial impressions are that it isn’t very good when working with subsets of data within individual files, or more complex queries. For example, you can search the playbills for the title ‘Macbeth’ and find matching playbills. But if you combine this with another field that exists in another play in the playbill (e.g. role ‘Jacques Strop’) the playbill record will still be returned. So even though the role mentioned actually belongs to a different play in the playbill, because both pieces of information exist somewhere in the playbill it gets returned.
With my initial experiments Solr also flattened out the data – all performer names appear in one list per playbill, not separate lists per play, and it’s the same with roles. Other than the order of the items in the lists, there is nothing to connect the two. The following screenshot shows one playbill record indexed within Solr (just using Solr’s default post and without customising a schema). You can maybe see how Solr has flattened things out, resulting in data being lost (e.g. which performer belongs to which play).
I then tried to index the data at play level, adding in a play ID and also any playbill level data (thus ensuring it’s still possible to search for date, venue etc). You can see the results in the following screenshot, which includes 5 separate records.
Here at least it’s possible to tell which performer / role belongs to which play. But performers / roles are still only connected by their position in the lists. Record 5 is a duplicate I made of record 4, but I deleted the ‘role’ text for one performer to see what would happen. And Solr indexed the record as it was, with 5 performers and 4 roles, so based on list order ‘Miss Newton’ is now ‘Landlord’ and not ‘Marie’, and ‘Mr. Watkins’ now had no role.
After further investigation I realised that it is possible to get sole to properly index nested data (see https://solr.apache.org/guide/solr/latest/indexing-guide/indexing-nested-documents.html) although instructions on how to actually import nested data into Solr are pretty thin on the ground – you can’t just use the default ‘post’ command as this flattens all data. I ended up following another tutorial (see https://docs.arenadata.io/en/ADH/current/how-to/solr/solr-index-nested-docs.html) and importing the data using the Solr admin interface. This thankfully worked, as the following screenshot demonstrates. You can see that individual performers are directly associated with roles.
There’s still a massive amount to do with the data, though. I need to extract unique venues, plays, performers and roles and assign IDs to them to enable them to be searches for. I decided that it would be easier to manage such processes via a relational database, so on Friday and mapped out a structure for the playbill data and bean working on an import script that would process the JSON files. Lots more to do in the coming weeks!
Once again this was a week of many different projects. I spent a fair amount of time on Monday preparing a CV for a Leverhulme bid that Clara Cohen is putting together. I hadn’t worked on a CV for at least 12 years, so it took some time to look back through everything and prepare the text. I spent most of the next couple of days on the Burns Supper Map project, with the bulk of this time spent writing a specification document that describes the map I’ll create and the data it will use. It took quite some time to prepare the document – not just the actual writing of it, but thinking through how the data will be presented and how users will interact with it. I’d completed a first draft by the end of Tuesday and sent it to the team for feedback. They are also going to send it on to other interested parties and hopefully they’ll get back to me next week and I can begin work developing the site.
On Tuesday I also met my fellow College of Arts and Humanities developers for one of our coffee and catch-up sessions and it was a good opportunity to hear what they’ve been up to and discuss some of the technical issues we are all currently dealing with. On Tuesday I also met with Jennifer Smith to prepare for our Speak For Yerself talk in Edinburgh next Monday. We’re just about there with our preparations and hopefully all will go well.
On Wednesday I set up a bare-bones WordPress site for the Playbills project, as the subdomain and server space I’d requested had come through. For the moment this does not include Solr (which we’ll need for the searches) and IIIF (which we’ll need for the images), but I’m intending to start developing things locally on my laptop so we don’t actually need these things just yet anyway. I’ll need some input from the project PI Deven Parker on things like images to use, themes, fonts, logos and colour schemes before we can go live with the initial project website and there’s no real rush to do this. I’m hoping to start working with the project’s YAML files to extract things like a list of distinct venues next week.
I spent most of the rest of the week working on the Place-names of Armagh project, working with the existing data and creating scripts to import all of the existing data they’d sent me relating to placenames, historical forms and sources into the CMS. There are now 2999 sources in the system and 233 place-name records, connected to 3412 historical forms. Almost all historical forms connect through to a source (3408). There was an issue with a source with ID 203 that was referenced in the historical forms spreadsheet but no source exists with this ID. It took some time to write and test the import scripts, and it’s possible further tweaking will be required, but I’m pretty happy with how the process went.
I also added in the available grid references. These were not in the CSV data I’d been sent, but were included in the shapefile data that I was able to load into QGIS. I was able to export this data as a CSV file from QGIS, and thankfully the IDs in this file corresponded to those of places in the other CSV files I’d been sent, so I was able to join things up and import the grid references. 141 out of 233 placenames have grid references, but what I haven’t had time to do yet is to use this to populate latitude, longitude and altitude. This is something I’ll need to look into next week.
I also mapped the ‘Status’ codes onto the classification codes in my system. I’ve added some new classification codes taken from the new data (‘Ro’ for road system, ‘X’ for ex nomine, ‘M’ for minor place, ‘D’ for district). Other status codes have been mapped onto existing classification codes. ‘H’ has become ‘R’ (relief), ‘V’ has become ‘S’ (Settlement). I haven’t imported ‘DY’ as this didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the codes.
I also imported all Parish, Barony and Townland associations for each place. Some places have a different parish in the 1865 and 1961 columns and in such cases the 1865 parish is associated as a ‘former parish’. I also imported the map sheets.
On Friday I had a useful meeting with the Armagh team where I talked them through the data in the CMS and we discussed some of the issues that cropped up. I now have a list of updates that I’ll need to make to the data structures and the CMS, including trying to automatically extract Irish names and translations, renaming ‘Discovery’ maps to ‘1:50,000’, removing the separate language fields from the historical forms, ensuring Townlands can be selected from a list, as with parishes and baronies, and adding in a new ‘Previous suggested form’ Y/N field to the historical forms.
Also on Friday I made a couple of updates to the Anglo-Norman Dictionary to ensure that ‘M.E.’ appears as ‘English’ in the entry and search pages. I also made a couple of minor updates to the Dynamic Dialects site and helped sort out an access issue that an RA was having with one of the project websites.
This was my first proper week back at work, having spent most of last week travelling and attending a workshop in Zurich. I spent a bit of time working on the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England, looking into issues that had cropped up at the workshop. Someone had spotted that the start and end dates for some lexemes appeared to be the wrong way round and last week I discovered there were 197 such cases. I had an ongoing discussion with the project PI Louise Sylvester about this. She sent me a spreadsheet that contained updated data for the thesaurus, with the idea being that we could check the erroneous dates against this. However, the spreadsheet was created for a later project than the BTH and had both a different structure and different data. For example, some categories in the online BTH were not included and many categories in the spreadsheet featured different or larger numbers of lexemes. The dates were in a different format, featuring ‘ante’ and ‘circa’, plus a question mark to denote other uncertainty and a plus to denote continuation. The BTH features none of this – just start and end dates. The spreadsheet also featured no links out to the MED and the AND, only links to the OED. We did wonder whether we should replace the online BTH with the data from the spreadsheet but all of these issues mean this just wouldn’t work. Instead we decided that I would (at some point) write a script to identify lexemes in the spreadsheet that are not in the online BTH and we can see about incorporating them. In the meantime I fixed the 197 lexemes that had their dates the wrong way round.
Also for the BTH this week I implemented an option to order the lexemes in a chosen category alphabetically, by first attested date or length of attestation (within the AN or ME section), where previously all lexemes were ordered alphabetically within each section. This is something that was raised at the workshop, and something I wanted to implement as it’s a useful feature. I’d already included this option in the main HT and parts of the code for it were lurking in the BTH code in an inactive state, although I needed to rework this as the main HT handles dates in a more complex manner. The update required changes to the database, the CSS, the PHP and the JS scripts, but it’s all now live and the site remembers your choice during your session, so if you select ‘length of attestation’ in one category and then navigate to another this is remembered. Below is a screenshot showing a category with the lexemes ordered by length of attestation:
This week I met with Jennifer Smith to discuss the talk we’re giving about Speak For Yersel in Edinburgh in a couple of weeks. We had a good chat and made a plan about writing our respective sections. I then spent about a day preparing the slides and text for my section and sent everything over to Jennifer so she could work on her parts.
Also this week I did a little bit of work for the AND, updating links from AND entries to the DMF, as their site has changed, which broke all our links. I thought I’d found a way to link through to their corresponding entries but unfortunately their URLs now include a session variable that expires after a while, and the URL doesn’t work without a valid session. This means it’s not currently possible to link to their entries so for now I’ve had to remove the links. Apparently they are working to fix things so hopefully we’ll be able to reinstate the links at some point.
On Friday I met with Deven Parker to discuss her Playbills project and the requirements document I sent her before Christmas. We discussed a few issues that had been raised in the feedback on the document and made a plan for the coming weeks, during which I will begin to work with the data and will start developing the online resource.
Other tasks I tackled this week included replacing the data I’d uploaded for the VARICS project last week with a new version I’d been sent, and also making several tweaks to the code and content of the lookup feature. I also changed the language abbreviation ‘Ga’ to ‘Ir’ in the place-names of Armagh content management system and fixed a typo in the Hummell edition on the Burns website that went live before Christmas.
I spent pretty much the entirety of this week continuing to develop the new interface for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language website, applying the Bootstrap-based mock-up I’d created many months ago to an instance of the actual DSL website running on my laptop. I can’t really go into too much detail about the new interface or provide any screenshots at this stage, but it’s been a pretty intensive process as every aspect of the old interface needs to be changed and various parts of it need to be integrated with WordPress, for example making widgets and ensuring the new layout works with different templates.
I managed to complete the bulk of the work this week (although this did include working several hours over the weekend too), in preparation for next week’s face-to-face DSL team meeting. This included the search results pages, the advanced search page, the dictionary entry page and the bibliography page. This may not seem like a very long list, but there was a huge amount of work to do on each of these pages, such as implementing the site panel for the entry page that features the dictionary browser, the search results browser and a new ‘entry log’ that keeps a record of entries the user has looked at during their session. I reckon the new interface is looks really good, and is a massive improvement on the live site, although there will inevitably be many further changes to be made before anything goes live.
I still need to complete the new top-level ‘About’ page, which acts as a large menu page, plus ensure that all regular WordPress pages work with the new interface and include the quick search. I’m hoping to finish these things off and then apply the interface to our online test instance of the site ahead of Wednesday’s meeting next week.
Also this week I spent a bit more time preparing for a talk about Speak For Yersel and Jennifer Smith and I were scheduled to give at the University of Edinburgh the week after next. However, later in the week we heard from the organisers that the University will be on strike when our talk is scheduled and we therefore reached a decision to cancel. It’s possible that we’ll be able to reschedule, as we are not directly involved in the strike action, but we’ll just need to see.
Also this week I created an initial version of a website for Henry Ivry’s project and contacted researcher Jenny Buckley with some further information about the processing of historical newspapers that might be of use for her project. I also made a small update to the Speech Star resource and had an email conversation with Eleanor Lawson about access restrictions for the resources data.
I participated in an online meeting regarding sharing the SCOSYA data with the Mozilla Foundation this week, and I also had a meeting with Pauline Mackay and Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman to discuss a new phase for the Interactive Map of Burns Suppers. I subsequently spent a bit of time reviewing some materials for the site. Finally, I exported some data from the Historical Thesaurus that we’re going to share with another project.
I spent a lot of my time this week creating a new WordPress theme and complete website interface for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, based on the Bootstrap mock-up I worked on several months ago. I had demonstrated this mock-up at the DSL’s last face-to-face meeting in February and the plan was for me to develop this into a fully functioning interface before the next meeting, which is taking place in a couple of weeks. However, since the meeting I was tasked with to major updates to the DSL: implementing the new DSL entry XML structure and developing the interactive maps of regions and dialect areas. The time I had intended to spend on the new interface was instead devoted to these two new tasks, meaning it is now unlikely that I will have the new interface completed before the next team meeting.
However, having now completed work on the to unanticipated major tasks, I am now at last able to focus on the new interface, which is what I did this week. I can’t really talk too much about the new interface or show any screenshots at this stage, but this week I set up a version of the site running on my laptop and created a new WordPress theme, initially replicating the current version. Creating the new interface from my mock-up was slightly tricky to begin with as so much needed to be done before anything could be tested. I needed to integrate Bootstrap and the JavaScript and CSS I’d created for the mock-up, replace the WordPress-powered site menu with a new one that uses Bootstrap, which requires incorporating a new class into WordPress to fully implement this (https://github.com/wp-bootstrap/wp-bootstrap-navwalker). I needed to completely replace the header and footer templates, plus the overall page template, I needed to replace the WordPress widgets I’d created for the old theme with new ones for the homepage info boxes, the quick search bar and the introductory text area, and I needed to create a second homepage for ‘Older Scots’ that could also use WordPress widgets. This, as you can maybe imagine, took a lot of time, but I managed to complete it all by the end of the week. There is still a huge amount to do, though, such as getting the new theme to actually display any dictionary content, such as the entries and the search results. I’ll continue with this next week.
Also this week I spent some time preparing some materials for the Speak For Yersel talk I’m giving with Jennifer later in November. We had intended to meet to go over things this week, but Jennifer needed to push this back to next week. I also met with Ophira Gamliel to discuss some ideas for a series of online TEI/XML/Oxygen workshops she’s running with colleagues in India, and to discuss support for digital editions in general across the College. I had another meeting with Jenny Buckley, a researcher in English Literature who is hoping to use AI tools to extract and analyse text from late 18th century newspapers, and I met with Alan Riach in Scottish Literature to help him extract some sound files that he needs for a conference.
In addition, I had an email conversation with Pauline Mackay and Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman about the interactive map of Burns Suppers, which Cleo is going to be reworking. I managed to extract the data for the map and its collection of images and send this on to them, and I’ll be meeting with them next week to discuss the redevelopment, which I will be involved with. I also wrote a section about data management and ethics for a proposal that Garrick Allen is putting together, spoke to Mícheál Ó Mainnín at Queens University Belfast about the place-names of Armagh website I’m putting together for him and had an email conversation with Henry Ivry about the website I’m working on for him.
My final task of the week was to create a spreadsheet template and accompanying data dictionary for the data for the interactive map for Ophira’s HiMuJe Malabar project. Project RA Renu Abraham will be using this template to record the data for all of the places relating to the project’s digital editions that we want to visualise on a map, and I will then create the map. It took the best part of a morning to define the structure and describe all of the columns, but hopefully this will be of use. It’s been a rather busy week, with lots more to continue with next week too.
It’s been a while since my last update due to holidays and conferences. The week beginning the 23rd of June I worked on Monday and Tuesday and then I was on holiday on Wednesday the 25th of June and didn’t return to work until Friday the 11th of July. Most of these three days were spent finalising my presentation for the DH2025 conference, going through the sizable conference programme to decide which of the parallel sessions to attend and sorting out arrangements for travelling to, from and around Lisbon.
I also made comments and suggestions for a document the DSL had prepared about the process for exporting data from their editing system into the online database and updated the copyright information for the recently updated IPA chart videos on the Seeing Speech site. As all videos previously had the same copyright statement, this was hard coded into the video overlays, so I needed to update the database in include flags for different statements and the code to then process the statements depending on the flags.
On Sunday the 13th I flew to Lisbon and attended the DH2025 conference (https://dh2025.adho.org/browse-the-program-agenda/). I didn’t attend any of the pre-conference workshops, but instead spent come of Monday exploring the city and finding the venue, and the rest of the time working: doing some last-minute run-throughs of my paper, making further updates to Seeing Speech, as it turned out some of the ExtIPA videos also needed their copyright statements updated.
On Tuesday afternoon the main conference began with a plenary, which discussed AI and the use of Large Language Models and Vision Language Models (LLMs and VLMs) in DH research, and also discussed storing data in a graph database (neo4j) and using the cypher graph query language, and getting AI to use this.
My paper was scheduled for the first session on Wednesday, which was great as it meant I could get it over with and enjoy the rest of the conference without having to worry about it. The presentation went well and I covered everything in the available time without any issues. However, the server that hosts Speak For Yersel and other resources went offline before my talk, which was really bad timing and rather embarrassing. Thankfully I wasn’t doing a live demonstration, but I had to tell everyone during my talk that they couldn’t view the resource as it was offline. I frantically tried to get people to sort the issue out before my talk began, but no-one was around at that time. Our IT people got the server back online again by the end of the session, but it was too late by then.
There were a few questions afterwards, none of them particularly awkward. They all related to class – I think people were particularly interested in how the education level of our participants was markedly different from the census data. One person wanted to know whether you could compare the results of people with different education levels, and I was able to discuss the filter options which offer this facility. Another person wondered whether there was anything that could be done to increase engagement with groups from lower education levels. I didn’t really have an answer for this, but talked about how targeted face-to-face approaches like SCOSYA are perhaps more effective at engaging directly with such groups. Another person suggested that we could in some way use the geographical data we have about our participants to tie this into the census data for these areas to gain further insights into their likely class and backgrounds based on where they live. I thought this sounded like a really interesting idea, even if it would obviously lead to assumptions being made about participants. Something to think about.
The other papers in my session were also generally about map-based resources – one used ArcGIS to map treasure-hunting expeditions, another mapped connections between cultural-heritage research, scholars and outputs. Another project discussed chopping up historical maps into squares and extracting features found in these squares, for example finding patches that feature railway lines to analyse the populations that existed in close proximity to railways, and more information can be found here: https://data.nls.uk/data/map-spatial-data/living-with-machines-railspace-building/.
The second session I attended also focussed on mapping. One paper looked at extracting places from historical Japanese prints, using AI tools such as SigLip (https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/model_doc/siglip) to identify features such as boats in images and then using crowdsourcing to identify real-world locations found in the prints via a ‘street view’ style interface. Another paper extracted places mentioned in the ‘Baltische Briefe’, a German-language newspaper from the Baltic states. This used Named-entity recognition (NER) to extract places from the text using the SpaCy tool (https://spacy.io/). Another paper discussed the representations of Colombian communities in New York and London. The speaker used the Mapbox Storytelling tool (https://labs.mapbox.com/storytelling/) for her presentation, which looks like a really great way of telling a story via maps. The final paper discussed issues relating to Soviet nuclear testing in central Asia, which was both interesting and horrifying to learn about.
The third session I attended featured three papers. The first was about extracting data from millions of French census records (see https://socface.site.ined.fr/en/ and https://socface.teklia.com/). The project is extracting data from the entire French census from 1836 to 1936 – between 20 and 30 million pages. The data is mostly tabular and clean, but obviously handwritten. It uses HTR (handwritten text recognition) and NER using YOLOv8 (https://docs.ultralytics.com/models/yolov8/) and DAN (https://gitlab.teklia.com/atr/dan). The speaker compared the current project which uses AI approaches to an earlier crowdsourcing project and demonstrated how cheaper and quicker the AI approach is – it would appear that crowdsourcing for these types of projects has had its day.
The second paper also focussed on AI tools, using GPT-4o to refine the prompts given to the AI tools to improve the retrieval while the third used AI tools to extract and analyse scenes from images in German children’s books from 1800 to 1940, looking to identify scenes of play, reading, teaching and such things whilst identifying the genders of the participants. Images were analysed using Doc-UFCN (https://pypi.org/project/doc-ufcn/) to detect and extract the illustrations from the pages and images were then classified using SmolVML (https://huggingface.co/blog/smolvlm), Llava (https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/model_doc/llava) and Qwen (https://huggingface.co/Qwen). They also used the Collection Space Navigator (https://collection-space-navigator.github.io/) to identify clusters.
For the last session of the day I didn’t find one that entirely appealed to me, and I attended the session on ‘Networks, Lexicons, Text Mining and Digital Philology’. The first paper was presented in Italian (but with slides in English), so it was a bit hard to follow, and none of the other papers were especially relevant to anything I do. One speaker did present some interesting visualisations using violin plots (see https://r-graph-gallery.com/violin.html) which I hadn’t seen before, so that was good to see.
On day two, the first session I attended discussed topic modelling on a corpus of poetry using NLTK. The second paper looked at gender portrayal in Chinese preschool children’s books from 2012 to 2022. The speaker identified 5922 books aimed at the 0-9 age group and used ChatGPT to identify categories, such as genders, race, age, and working out whether the characters were central or side characters. The third paper discussed making TEI resources multilingual and the fourth explored gender differences in gaming culture. This looked at game streaming on Twitch, and specifically the comments posted on male vs. female streamers’ videos. It focussed on German language videos, with data collected for one week, looking at the top 16 female and male streamers. 370,000 messages were captured, but only 165,000 had more than 4 tokens. Topic modelling was performed on these using BERTopic (https://maartengr.github.io/BERTopic/index.html) and clustered using HDBScan (https://hdbscan.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). It was an interesting paper but there’s more refinement that could be done – the gender of message posters was not included, the genres of the games were not considered, so different audiences would likely be targeted. The final paper discussed the ‘dark sides of DH’ and discussed how DH datasets can be full of bias, such as colonial and gender.
The second session I attended was about handwritten text recognition and AI. The first speaker discussed ‘The Delineator’, a US women’s magazine from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The speaker discussed using Newspaper Navigator (https://github.com/LibraryOfCongress/newspaper-navigator) to extract images and used CLIP (https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/model_doc/clip) to classify them. The speaker also mentioned Chroma DB (https://github.com/chroma-core/chroma) as a means of storing data that can then be queried by AI tools.
The second speaker discussed using ChatGPT to generate SKOS thesaurus structures from images of the required data structures, either hand-drawn of created digitally, using both a real thesaurus and a fictional one. The tool was able to generate the required structures with a high level of accuracy.
The third speaker discussed a tool to automatically transcribe Catalan manuscripts from the middle-ages. These were notaries (wills etc), and the project included 750,000 images. These included cursive handwriting, medieval Latin and large numbers of abbreviations. They looked at a sample of 100 charters (3369 lines, 80 hands, 29 document types) from 1208 to 1499. They manually annotated the 100 images using eScriptorium (https://escriptorium.rich.ru.nl/) to segment the lines which were then transcribed using the Kraken tool (https://hal.science/hal-04936936v1/file/0673a.pdf).
The fourth speaker looked at HTR models for 16th and 17th century Spanish writing (see the project website https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/newspainfleets). The project is looking at ship registers for voyages from Spain to Mexico – around 10,000 documents with 4 script types. They are developing HTR models for these using Transkribus. In the training data, lines were manually identified to cover large ascenders and descenders and the project intend to publish their models as open access. The speaker noted that image quality makes a big difference, with less and 1 megapixel being very bad, 5 being good and at anything over 8 the picture quality stops being an issue.
The final speaker discussed using LLMs to perform post-OCR error correction on historical French texts. The speaker used Llama 3.2-3b instruct (https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct) using prompts telling the LLM that it is performing OCR correction and to correct errors whilst preserving the 19th century style and retaining the line breaks. The speaker noted that the output was worse than the original OCR, with semantic errors, formatting errors and context misrepresentation. It was still interesting to hear about, though, and someone suggested giving the LLM the image as well as the OCR might help in future.
When it came to the third session of the day I was again uncertain which to attend, as none of them seemed especially relevant to me. I ended up attending a session on ‘Text Mining, Tracing and Quantification in Literature’. The first paper was about gender depictions in medieval Chinese epitaph verses and wasn’t really my kind of thing. The second was about Lady Gregory’s Irish Legends and how she adapted the original works to support Irish nationalism, using NLTK and word2vec. The final speaker examined references to Greco-Roman authors in modern academic discourse, looking at 56,116 articles across 16 disciplines from 1990 to 2019, analysed using Spearman rank correlation and Zipf distribution and generating UMAP (uniform manifold approximation and projection) plots to show clusters.
The final session of the day was on evaluating projects and tools. This included a speaker who evaluated DH websites to find common objectives and to investigate whether these had been met and a speaker also reviewed DH websites, this time their interfaces and whether accessibility guidelines had been adhered to. A further speaker discussed the creation of an AI assistant for the Basque language using retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to ensure the use of up to date information sources. Another speaker evaluated the use of Graph RAG (https://microsoft.github.io/graphrag/) to retrieve semantically structured data, while the final speaker discussed creating apps in ChatGPT that could then be used to perform small tasks, such as converting TXT files to CSV.
I began the third and final day of the conference by attending a session on ‘mapping and visualising conflict, violence and slavery’. The first presentation was about a large-scale historical and archaeological study of Basel in Switzerland, which is producing more than 20 published volumes and a lot of online data. The paper was focussed on working collaboratively across different disciplines and the conflicts that can arrive between participants.
The second speaker discussed interactive maps of police violence in the US, which used hexagonal grids to represent the data rather than relying on boundaries that are created by authority and don’t reflect the real world. Maps can be divided into triangles, squares or hexagons and the latter have 6 neighbours, each of equal distance, so work best. Clusters were generated using Local Moran’s I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moran%27s_I). The speaker also discussed adding in a temporal element too, for example using ArcGIS space time cubes (https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-pro/announcements/introducing-a-new-space-time-cube-visualization-experience-in-arcgis-pro). The speaker sourced his data from https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/.
The third speaker discussed visualising resistance in the archive of slavery, and discussed a history of data visualisation from 1786 to 1900, and how the 19th century was the beginning of modern visualisation, discussing the work of William Playfair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Playfair). She pointed out that all visualisations have an agenda, going on to show a contemporary visualisation of the layout of a slave ship and then demonstrating so beautiful but quite difficult to interpret visualisations about slave ship voyages, which can be accessed here: https://dataxdesign.io/chapters/description#voyage-interactive
The second session of the day also looked at visualisations, along with automating text processing using LLMs. The first speaker looked at LLMs producing code, and a pipeline that could be used for code generation and refinement using a prompt from a human that is then passed through the pipeline, passing the prompt to GPT-4o, then refining and executing.
The second speaker discussed Pandore (https://obtic.sorbonne-universite.fr/developpement/toolbox/), a toolbox that can be used to perform OCR, format conversion, NER, topic modelling without the user needing any IT knowledge. The third speaker presented ‘Flow filter’, a generalisable visualisation and query toolkit. The speaker gave some excellent demonstrations of the tool, for example from the Saltaire census data, but I’m unable to find any information about the tool online to link to.
The fourth speaker presented about open science literacy and the final speaker discussed using LLMs for NER in Urdu, highlighting how many standard libraries do not work well with languages that are written right to left.
In the third session of the day there wasn’t anything that seemed hugely relevant, so I ended up attending a session that included a discussion of open archaeology in Catalan, a speaker who created ‘time maps’ for plays / novels / films that plot the actual passage of time on one axis and the order of events on the other axis. The speaker used Pulp Fiction as an example, visualising how the various story segments take place in the film and how they are chronologically ordered. The final speaker discussed automated vs manual subset selection in the Finnish national bibliography, looking at first editions for adults that were published between 1909 and 1917.
I also didn’t find anything in the final session that seemed all that relevant and attended a session that featured three papers on quite different subjects. The first looked at how to measure dramatic texts, looking at key components such as plot, character, dialogue and action. The speaker discussed the work of Boris Yarkho, a Russian literary scholar who looked at speech distribution in five-act tragedies, and also discussed vectorising plays – reducing them to an ordered sequence of numbers based on features. The speaker made use of the DraCor corpus (https://dracor.org). The second speaker was about Ukrainian Epigraphy, and more specifically about mapping resources and terms that had been created for Greco-Roman epigraphy so that they would be applicable to Ukrainian epigraphy. The final speaker discussed how the post-colonial canon is dominated by a few Western-based English Language writers such as Salman Rushdie, and discussed whether broadening this out with translations of texts from South Asia could improve the situation.
The conference ended with the customary closing ceremony that involved some prizes being given out, some closing speeches and some information about future DH conferences. DH2026 will be held in Daejeon, South Korea while DH2027 will be held in Galway, Republic of Ireland. DH2028 will be held in Cape Town, South Africa.
Monday this week was a public holiday, and I divided my four working days across several projects. The Iona place-names project is having its official launch on the 9th of June and a fairly last minute request for the map interface was to incorporate ‘thematic maps’ – maps that show a set of markers that share a common theme, such as bird names. Last Friday Sofia sent me the data for two example thematic maps (which I think we’re going to be calling ‘Virtual Trails’ in the public interface) and this week I set about creating the new feature.
When creating a new feature I’d usually create the sections of the CMS for managing the data before updating the front-end but as time is rather tight I thought it best to create the necessary structures in the database, the required updates to the API and work directly on the front-end with the sample data. If there’s time before the launch I’ll create the CMS pages, but if not and we want to add more maps I’ll just have to get the team to send me spreadsheets and I’ll add the data directly to the database. Below is a screenshot showing the new map:
I’m still working on this and there is still quite a bit to do, as adding in the new section and new map type has meant a lot of reworking of existing structures. But as the above screenshot demonstrates, the interface now features a new ‘Virtual Trails’ menu section that when expanded has a placeholder description and a ‘Choose a virtual trail’ button. Pressing on this opens a popup that lists the thematic maps, showing the titles and descriptions. Pressing on a title closes the popup, adds the selected map’s title and description to the left-hand menu and loads the relevant map markers into the map. You can then change the display options (e.g. turning labels to always on, changing the classification or base map) and open the records as you would with any other map.
So that’s the basics in place, but there are still many updates I’ll need to make to the front-end to fully integrate the new feature, including ensuring that the ‘Reset map’ resets the virtual trail menu contents, ensuring citations and bookmarks / sharing URLs work when a trail is selected, ensuring the table view works properly and cancelling out any already active search or browse options when a trail is selected.
Also this week I applied the new updates I’d made last week to the element glossary to the other place-name maps, such as Berwickshire. I also added ‘deselect’ to the legend, as apparently users were unaware that the ‘select all’ option could be used to ‘deselect all’ when unchecked., and I spotted that the Iona full map ‘cite’ option was referencing the Ayr site and fixed that too.
For Speak For Yersel, I spent some time this week creating the slides for my presentation at the Lisbon DH conference, and I have now completed a first version of the slides and script. I’m probably going to have to trim it down a little, though, as when running through it I was taking longer than my allotted ten minutes. I’ll probably have to take out the parts about how the maps were generated, which is a shame as it’s the most DH section, but it’s also not something we discussed in the abstract so if anything needs cut it’s the obvious choice.
On Thursday this week I met with Ophira Gamliel to discuss the interviews for her project, which are taking place next week, and in the afternoon I attended a Modernities Research Cluster event which featured two fascinating speakers. I also fixed an issue with the Thesaurus of Old English for Jane Roberts and fixed a problem with the batch update of citations in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary. This feature of the content management system allows citations across all entries (or selected entries) to be updated simply by editing the citation once. However, there was a problem when adding dates to citations that did not already have them. The script was running into problems when adding a date for an attestation that didn’t already have a <dateInfo> element. I’d included a check for this, but the check was causing a fatal error rather than executing the code that I’d written to deal with such attestations. Thankfully once identified it was relatively easy to fix the problem, and now the batch update system is working perfectly.
It was a four-day week this week due to the May Day holiday on Monday. On Tuesday I spent quite a bit of time responding to a couple of emails from Tony Harris about the Bilingual Thesaurus system, which he is repurposing for another project. This involved going through the code and database for the Bilingual Thesaurus and refamiliarising myself with everything in order to reply to Tony’s questions. Whilst doing so I also spotted that one of the lexemes in the thesaurus was classed as a noun when it should have been a verb, so after checking with the PI Louise I corrected this.
Also on Tuesday I finally managed to register for the DH2025 conference with the help of Critical Studies Admin Emma McCluskey, and it’s great to have everything sorted for the conference now. We also tried to sign me up for the DH even that is happening in Glasgow in June but unfortunately encountered some issues with the registration process and were unable to proceed. I’ve contacted the event organisers and hopefully I’ll be able to complete the process next week. I also fixed a minor issue with the pilot website for the Books and Borrowing project and replied to Kirsteen McCue about a collection of songs and accompanying documents that we’ll be adding to the Burns website soon.
On Wednesday I focussed on preparing my presentation for the DH2025 conference. I’d met with Jennifer Smith last week to discuss this and she’d prepared an initial Powerpoint presentation, and my task was to reshape this and prepare the actual talk around the slides. The structure differs slightly from Jennifer’s original, with the biggest changes being the inclusion of a brief discussion about SCOSYA at the start, to give a bit of context for the creation of SFY, and also the inclusion of a section describing how the maps are generated as I figured the audience are likely to be more technical than linguistic and might be interested in this. There’s quite a lot of content, but I timed myself reading the text and it came in at about 8 minutes, so hopefully it will be about right. Obviously I’ll read through it many more times and will tweak things if needs be. I also sent it on to Jennifer in case she would like me to make any changes or has any suggestions.
On Thursday I had an online meeting with the Dictionaries of the Scots Language to discuss our recent rollout of the new version of the DSL data and accompanying new website features such as the sparklines. This was a very useful meeting where we all had a chance to discuss the process and any aspects that could be improved in future releases. Also mentioned at the meeting was that the team wanted to reinstate the ‘filter results by dates’ option on our test site for further testing, which I did after the meeting. I also shared the scripts and instructions needed for generating a new version of the DSL data from the XML files outputted from the DSL’s editing system so the team has a copy of everything in case I become unavailable for whatever reason.
The editor Ann Ferguson also spotted an issue with the bibliographical links referenced in some entries. These were not displaying as links and were therefore not leading to the relevant bibliographical entry. It turned out that the possibility of there being authors and no titles in the citation records had been overlooked in my code and in such cases the link to the bibliography wasn’t getting added in. Thankfully once identified it was relatively quick to fix – no need to regenerate the Solr index or anything like that. I don’t think the update will have introduced any unintended consequences so I therefore updated both the live and our test site to implement the fix.
On Thursday and Friday I also did some work for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary. The editor Geert wanted me to update the new cognate reference section in the advanced search to have all cognate dictionaries unselected by default, which I did. This does now mean that the cogref search will not submit when someone types in some text and presses ‘search’ – they will always have to make a dictionary selection first. However, Geert seemed happy with this.
Geert also wanted to make the ‘Advanced Search’ option more prominent in the site’s navigation and suggested moving it from the site menu to a separate button near the ‘Quick Search’ section in the top right of every page. I pointed out that we need to retain the ‘Advanced Search’ menu item in the menu bar as all major sections of the site are represented in this bar, and one is always highlighted. If we removed ‘Advanced search’ from the menu bar we’d end up with no item highlighted whenever a user is looking at the search form or search results, which I think would be confusing. However, I agreed that the advanced search could do with more prominence and proposed that we retain the ‘Advanced Search’ menu item, but we also include a ‘Try an advanced search’ link underneath the quick search bar in the header. I favoured text rather than a button, as a button would be too prominent and would take the user’s eye away from the actual search button. I sent a mockup image of this to Geert and he agreed with me, so I implemented the update, which is now live on all AND pages.
Geert also mentioned that the bibliography (https://anglo-norman.net/bibliography/) was very slow to load and I spent much of Friday reworking this. The bibliography page was loading all 1300+ sigla and then limiting the display to those with titles matching the selected letter. This was not a very efficient way to handle things and must have been implemented back when the bibliography was much less extensive. Instead I updated the API and the bibliography page so that only those sigla that actually begin with the selected letter are returned and processed. This has massively increased the speed at which the page loads.
I also noticed that the ‘Citation Siglum’ search box in the ‘Citations’ tab of the advanced search was not functioning as it should do. As you type into this box a list of sigla that match the characters you enter should be displayed, allowing you to select the appropriate item. However, no matter what text you entered the entire list of more than 1300 sigla was being displayed, which took time to load in and was utterly useless. I also fixed this and now (for example) when you type in ‘roy’ you are presented with a list of sigla that actually feature these characters anywhere in their titles. I’m not exactly sure when these issues arose, but I’m guessing it was when we reworked the sigla to greatly expand the information included (e.g. items, links to cognate dictionaries etc). I’m glad Geert brought the issues to my attention and I was able to fix things.
This week I began to implement the new versioning system for Books and Borrowing. I’d written a specification document for this a few weeks ago and at a meeting last Friday we agreed that I should implement the more complex system I’d proposed. This week I focussed on updating the underlying database and the content management system to add in the required version systems. The database now has a ‘version’ table, and all major tables have been updated to include a reference to this. I’ve created a ‘version 1.0’ version and have associated all existing data with this, and I’ve also created a new ‘version 1.1’ version. Now when staff log into the CMS the current version (set to ‘version 1.1’) is logged and all ‘add’ forms in the CMS have been updated to store the current version when the forms are submitted. All this happens behind the scenes, so the project team shouldn’t notice any changes.
There are, however, a number of other visible changes to the CMS that I implemented. There is now a new ‘Browse versions’ menu item that when clicked on displays a table listing the versions that exist. Version 1.0 is set to ‘live’, meaning that when I’ve updated the front-end only data from this version will be used. Note, however, that I’ve not made any updates to the front-end yet, so for now any new data that is added to the CMS will still appear when browsing registers but will not be found in the stats or searches, until the caches and Solr index are updated.
Also in the CMS, all ‘browse’ tables now have a new ‘When Created’ column that displays the version that each item was created under. Note that edits do not affect the version number – we’re only tracking new additions. I had to make changes to the database queries throughout the CMS and although I’ve tested things out pretty thoroughly on an instance running on my laptop it’s possible that a bug or two might have crept in so I’ll just have to see how the project team get on. The next step will be to update the Solr index and the other cached data, plus the scripts that generate this data. After that will come the updates to the front-end. These are going to involve some pretty hefty changes and may take some time to sort out.
On Tuesday this week I had a meeting with Marc Alexander and Faye Hammill, who is the Research Convener for the School. It was a good opportunity to catch up with Faye and to hear more about the current research landscape in the School, and to consider how my role can be promoted to academic staff in the School who possibly aren’t aware of my existence and the help I can offer. Faye also mentioned a Digital Humanities conference that is taking place in the University in June (https://digitalhumanities-uk-ie.org/). Somehow I wasn’t aware that this was taking place and I’m really glad that Faye brought it to my attention.
Also this week I met with Jennifer Smith to discuss the paper we will be giving at the DH2025 conference in Lisbon in July. Jennifer has decided not to attend the conference, so it will just be me presenting the paper, and we put together an initial version of a Powerpoint presentation that I will hopefully have some time to work on next week. I also got approval from Marc this week to register for the conference. This is something that needs to be handled by the School admin people, but unfortunately when I met with one of the team on Friday to fill out the form there were some uncertainties and we’ll need to complete the process next week. Thankfully the ’early bird’ rate for the conference has been extended by a week so that shouldn’t be a problem.
A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by Carole Hough who wanted access to the contents of Cognitive Topography, an old website that disappeared about five years ago. At that time the domain expired and Carole had arranged for the contents of the site to be moved to the University’s T4 system. Unfortunately there must have been some crossed wires as only the landing page was transferred, along with links to other pages that were still hosted on the now defunct domain. I’d been away from Glasgow for the past couple of weeks but promised to look into finding a backup of the site this week, as I am now back in Glasgow.
Thankfully I managed to locate a backup of the old site and managed to get a version of it mostly up and running again. It was a bit of a struggle getting the old site working as the WordPress version it’s running on is almost 10 years old and is incompatible with modern server technology. I had to downgrade some of the server software to get it to run, which is a security risk, so this can only be a temporary solution. Unfortunately the version of WordPress is so old it’s not even possible for me to access the admin interface (even though the credentials are correct) so getting things to display has required a good deal of furtling about directly with the database and scripts and upgrading the version of WordPress to a modern version isn’t really an option.
The site header is not displaying at the correct size and I’ve had to remove the multilingual (English and Danish, I think) plugin as it was preventing the site from loading. All of the content appears to be present, but the English parts start with [:en] and the Danish parts with [:DA].. Several of the pages also had images and links to other pages that used the full defunct URL, meaning they were broken. I therefore ran a ‘find and replace’ on these so they should now work and there hopefully won’t be any links to the defunct URL.
I shared the temporary URL with Carole and we are now thankfully in a position to rescue the content of the old site. I contacted Mick Eadie in the library, who is in charge of the library’s archiving of old University websites and he has very helpfully agreed to run the library’s archiving tool over the temporary site, after which the site should be preserved and accessible via their archiving tool, at which point the T4 page about the project can be updated to link to it. Hopefully this will happen in the next week or so.
Also this week I spoke to Eleanor Lawson about adding updated animation files to the Seeing Speech site, I gave some advice to Delphine Demelas of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary about technical expertise for future research projects, I agreed to be on an interview panel for Ophira Gamliel’s project, I had a chat to Andrew McHugh about an issue with one of the SiteGround hosted sites that resulted in the issue getting resolved, and I had a chat with Luca about issues with our locally hosted server going down, which has also now hopefully been resolved.