Monday was the late May bank holiday this week, so it was a four-day week for me.  On Tuesday I had an online meeting with Tony Harris, a developer at Cambridge who will be working on a project about Middle English Lexicon.  The project involves Louise Sylvester, who is in charge of the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Live in Medieval England (https://thesaurus.ac.uk/bth/) which I developed, and this new project is going to expand upon the data held in this resource.  We had a good chat about the Bilingual Thesaurus and the technologies I’d used to put it together, and discussed some ways in which the new project might function from a technical perspective.  It’s likely that we’ll meet again in the coming months to expand upon our ideas and I’ll probably be involved with the project in some small capacity.

Also on Tuesday fellow Arts developer Stevie Barrett and I met with the ‘Technical Champion’ for the College of Arts and Humanities, Aris Palyvos who is a technician in Archaeology.  We had a good chat about the role of technicians in the College and how we can improve our visibility.  We now have a Teams group for technicians and hopefully we’ll be able to meet up with some of the others in the College in the coming months.

Last week I’d started work on a content management system for Burns correspondence and I spent a bit of time this week finishing things off.  I’ve given Craig and Pauline in Scottish Literature access to the CMS now and they have someone starting next week who will be using the system so I’ll just need to see how they get on and if they request any changes.

Also this week I made a few further tweaks to the new Speak For Yersel survey regions, fixed a couple of typos on the Speech Star website and helped to resolve a fairly serious issue with the Books and Borrowing website.  The IIIF server that the website uses had gone offline, meaning none of the images of register pages were loading.  Our usual IT guy at Stirling was out of office, but thankfully someone else there was able to get things up and running again.

I also completed my work on the migration of the British Association for Romantic Studies’ journal the BARS Review (https://www.bars.ac.uk/review).  This has taken quite some time over the past few weeks to get sorted but it’s now up and running.  To get it working I needed to switch the PHP version the site was using from a rather ancient version to the current version, and thankfully the other parts of the site that don’t use the OJS system were not adversely affected by this change.  I also took the opportunity to add Google reCAPTCHA to the site for registration and login, which should hopefully stop the spam registrations.  Registration also now requires the user to verify their registration via an email.  I also made a few additional security updates that I’d better not discuss here.

I spent the rest of the week working for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, making a few tweaks to the advanced search on our test server, investigating some issues and replying to emails.  I also made a fairly major change to the sparkline data for entries so that dates of attestation beyond the period of each dictionary are handled in a different manner.  Previously all such dates were bundled together as the start or end date and then this date was used to generate blocks for the sparkline visualisation.  For example, ‘Abeich’ in SND has a first date of attestation of 1568, a long time before the official start date of the dictionary, which is 1700.  Previously this start date was being converted to 1700.  Our ‘cut off’ point for generating blocks of continuous attestation is now set to 50 years, meaning that if there are two or more attestations 50 years or less from each other this results in a block of continuous usage in the sparkline visualisation.  As the next date of attestation for the entry was 1721 the resulting sparkline therefore gave a continuous block from 1700 to 1721, which did not affect the underlying data, plus the sparkline text then included ‘1700-1721’ which was not at all accurate.  See the following screenshot to see what I mean:

I updated the code that generates the data for the sparklines so that any dates prior to 1700 result in the text ‘<1700’ appearing and the code no longer uses such dates as a starting point for a ‘block’ in the visualisation.  After the update we’re now presented with the following sparkline, which has a line at the start of the visualisation representing ‘<1700’ and then a gap from this point until 1721, which is the first attestation in the dictionary’s official period:

In order to get this working I needed to regenerate the data for Solr and then update the Solr core with the new data.  For now this is only running on my laptop and I have put in a request with our IT people to update the online Solr cores, as I don’t have access to do this myself.  Once the change has been made our online test site will be updated and hopefully it won’t be too much longer before we can actually update the live site and make this new feature available to everyone.