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

Curious Travellers

The project explores Romantic-period accounts of journeys into Wales and Scotland with a focus on the writings of the Flintshire naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), whose published Tours of both countries did so much to awaken public interest in the ‘peripheries’ of Britain. 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

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

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

Interactive Map of Burns Suppers Worldwide

Featuring more than 1000 Burns Suppers across all 7 continents and in 75 countries around the world, this resource seeks to record, illustrate, and offer new insights into the ways in which the tradition of the Burns Supper continues to be maintained, adapted and reimagined in the 21^st century. Find out more

Scots Syntax Atlas

The Scots Syntax Atlas presents the results of over 100,000+ acceptability judgments from over 500 speakers on over 250 morphosyntactic phenomena. The Atlas also contains a text-to-sound aligned corpus of spoken data totalling 275 hours and over 3 million words. 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

Books and Borrowing: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers, 1750-1830

Books and Borrowing uncovers and reinterprets the history of reading in Scotland in the period 1750 to 1830 through 144,000 borrowing records across 18 libraries. 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

Week Beginning 19th August 2024

Posted on26th August 2024Authorbaitken

I spent quite a bit of time this week completing the redevelopment of the ‘Readings in Early English’ resource. This was the first of the old STELLA desktop applications that I converted into an app and web resource more than a decade ago and the interface was in need of some modernisation. Last week I’d put together a first attempt at a new interface and this week I refined it and migrated all of the content across. This took quote some time as I needed to reformat much of the content for the 28 texts. Here are a couple of ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots. Firstly the homepage:

And one of the texts:

The ‘notes’ for each text were previously hidden in a pop-up but I’ve mode these permanently visible as the notes can include a lot of useful information that could otherwise be missed. I haven’t gone live with the new interface yet, but will do so this week. I also still need to decide whether to pursue the publication of app versions or whether we’ll just stick with web-based resources now. I’m in two minds about this. It takes a lot of time and effort to publish apps on the app stores and I’d rather not have to jump through all of these hoops on an annual basis in order to ensure the apps remain visible. But having the resources in app form would make them more visible to a broader audience, so it may be worth the effort. I’ll need to think about this some more.

Also this week I spent some time working for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language. I’d been sent some video recordings of presentations made at a recent team meeting, discussing new projects that are underway. I watched these and gave some feedback on how these projects may require the front-end to be updated. I also participated in a Teams call with the DSL people on Thursday, at which we discussed further upcoming projects and ongoing tasks such as the new date searches. I’d also been sent a few further updates to make to the new date searches so implemented these. This included adding in the total extent of attestation as text to the left of the sparklines in the search results and updating the way the ‘filter by date’ works when single years are entered, bringing this into line with how the ‘search by date’ boxes work. I also updated the algorithm that generates the sparkline text to tweak the way entries with no end date are displayed. This took a bit of time to update and test, and after I was satisfied with the output I then needed to regenerate the Solr index data as the sparkline text is stored in these indexes. As I can’t update the online Solr instance myself I submitted a Helpdesk job to get things sorted, but as of yet this has not been acted upon. I’m sure it will all get sorted next week.