Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus

The Metaphor Map of English shows the metaphorical links which have been identified between different areas of meaning. These links can be from the Anglo-Saxon period right up to the present day so the map covers 1300 years of the English language. 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

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 It replicates Goldsworthy's Slide Cabinet Index, and includes previously unpublished material from Goldsworthy's Sketchbook Diaries.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

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

Bess of Hardwick's Letters

Bess of Hardwick's Letters brings together, for the first time, the remarkable letters written to and from Bess of Hardwick (c.1521/2 or 1527-1608), one of Elizabethan England's most famous figures. 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

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

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

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

Week Beginning 29th September 2025

Posted on6th October 2025Authorbaitken

I spent a lot of my time this week working with the new entry XML data structure for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language. I received an export of all of the XML data from the DSL’s editing system on Monday and set to work updating my data processing scripts, the database and the Solr index structure, all on my laptop at this stage. I have updated the citation extraction script so that it now extracts senses at all levels throughout the entry document. I’ve also updated the script to deal with <cit> elements that contain multiple <cref> elements, as previously only the first was being extracted. The number of entries in the newly processed data has gone down from 78,165 to 78,141. The number of extracted citations has gone up from 748,947 to 752,250.

I also created a new ‘citations_geo’ table that holds information about the <geo> tags found within each citation. This is a separate table as a citation may have more than one <geo> tag. After extracting the data this table now contains 172,018 rows relating to 171,290 citations from 22,847 entries (all SND). I then updated the Solr indexes (both ‘entries’ and ‘quotations’) to include new fields for the <geo> data. These allow multiple <geo> information to be stored. I then needed to update the scripts that process the data for ingest into Solr to incorporate these fields, using the new table mentioned above. These new fields in Solr will be used for region searching and filtering. If we’re only wanting to add region searches to the quotations search the updates to the ‘entries’ index are not strictly necessary, but I thought I’d add this in just in case we want to use it in future. For example “show me all of the entries that have at least one quotation from Edinburgh and at least one quotation from Shetland”.

I’ve also begun to update the XSLT to format the new elements in the entry page. So far all I’ve done is update the <geo> tag to add in the mini-map popups, as you can see in the following screenshot:

These use the same tooltips as we use for the sparklines etc. I’m not going to do much more with the styling of them for now as these tooltips will be replaced by a different library when I work on the new site design anyway. Next week I’ll continue to make the necessary updates to the XSLT and I’ll then get everything transferred from my laptop to our test server. I may also begin implementing the region search / filter option, but I need to get some feedback from the DSL team before I can so this.

The DSL ream had also spotted an issue with the dictionary browse feature missing off the first few entries from the dictionaries. This was a strange one as I was unable to replicate the issue, and it didn’t seem to be related to browser or operating system. After a lot of testing I finally managed to replicate it on my iPad, and after that I was able to figure out how it was being triggered. The issue was happening on screens that are not tall enough to display the full-size browse pane. The reason this wasn’t being triggered on my phone is because the screen was narrow enough to make the browse appear underneath the entry, meaning there was enough space to display the full browse. On iPads and other displays that are wide but not so tall a compact version of the browse that contains less entries is displayed. The code that returned the limited list was chopping five items off the start and end of the full list, meaning at the start of the dictionary the first five items were never getting displayed. This was only affecting the start of the dictionary and not the end – I’ve just checked with ‘zulu’ – and I’ve now fixed it.

Also this week I created all of the necessary pages and uploaded all necessary files for a new edition of Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s Scottish Songs for George Thomson that will be added to the ‘Editing Burns’ website. These pages are not yet live, but I completed work on them, and met with the researcher, Marjory Rycroft, who compiled the data and undertook the research.

I also had an email conversation with Henry Ivry about a new website he wants to set up. I’m meeting with him to discuss this further next week. I also had to spend some time with Luca and Andrew trying to fix the problem of the Emblems websites being swamped by non-legitimate page requests. By the end of the week we’d managed to address a lot of these, but there is still more that needs to be done to improve the site’s stability.