The Books and Borrowing project has its official launch next week, and I spent some time this week preparing for it.  This included fixing a speed issue with the site-wide fact page (https://borrowing.stir.ac.uk/facts/) that was taking far too long to load its default view, something that has somehow got worse since I originally created the feature.  After undertaking some investigation into what was causing the slow loading time it turned out that the main sticking point was the loading of data for the two ‘Borrowings through time’ visualisations.  This was taking quite a long ..read more

I’d taken a day off this week, so only worked four.  I began the week continuing to work on the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, making a tweak to the publications scripts I was working on last week and then planning a new search of language tags that the editor wanted to be added.  Language tags are at entry level (i.e. they apply to the whole entry) and are used to denote loanwords. There are only 2660 entries that currently feature the language tag (and 24,762 that don’t) so the search is going to be fairly limited.  I explored two possible developments.  Firstly, we could have ..read more

This was a four-day week as Friday was the Good Friday holiday.  I’ll also be on holiday for all of next week other than Friday, giving me a nice Easter break.  I spent a lot of this week continuing to overhaul the Speech Star website (the version for speech therapists that hasn’t been publicly launched yet).  I’d made a start with this last week but still had many updates to implement.  This included incorporating the IPA and extIPA charts into the website, but ensuring that only the animation videos rather than the MRI scans were included.  I had also been given a se ..read more

I was off sick from Tuesday to Thursday this week having caught some sort of virus that laid me low.  However, on Monday I managed to complete the migration of all 156 poems in the Anthology of 16th and Early 17th Century Scots Poetry from ancient HTML to TEI XML.  It’s something I’ve been working on since the New Year and it’s great to have finally completed it.  The site is not yet live, though, as I need to wait until I receive feedback from the project PI.  I’ll probably need to update and expand the information in the TEI header of each poem and I’d also like to make t ..read more

I spent some time this week further tweaking the Speak For Yersel survey tool I’ve been working on recently.  I completed an initial version of the tool last week, using it to publish a test version of the linguistic survey for the Republic of Ireland (not yet publicly available) and this week I ran the data for Northern Ireland through the tool.  As I did so I began to think about the instructions that would be needed at each stage and I also reworked the final stages of the tool. The final stage previously involved importing the area GeoJSON file and the settlement CSV file in orde ..read more

I continued to work on the new Speak For Yersel survey creation tool this week, using the Republic of Ireland as my test area.  I managed to complete the ‘maps’ pages, which let users view all of the survey data on interactive maps.  We’re still testing the new system so there’s not much data to actually view, but below is a screenshot showing one of the maps: I also tweaked things to make it possible to cite / share / bookmark a specific map.  This does mean that each time you select a different map the entire page needs to reload (as opposed to replacing the map only) but I th ..read more

I spent much of Monday this week continuing to migrate the Anthology of 16th and Early 17th Century Scots Poetry to TEI XML.  I’ve now migrated 43 poems, so I think I’m about a third of the way there.  It’s still going to take quite some time, but I’ll just keep tackling a few when I find the time, until they’re all done. I spent the rest of the week continuing to work on the new Speak For Yersel regions.  I’m starting with the Republic of Ireland as my test area for the development of a more generic tool that can then be used to create similar surveys in other geographical area ..read more

On Monday this week I addressed a couple of issues with the Books and Borrowing search that had been identified last Friday.  Multi-word searches were not working as intended and were returning far too many results.  The reason being (as mentioned last week) a search for ‘Lord Byron’ (without quotes) was searching the specified field for ‘Lord’ and then all fields for ‘Byron’.  It was rather tricky to think through this issue as multi-word searches surrounded by quotes need to be treated differently, as do multi-word searches that contain a Boolean.  We don’t actually menti ..read more

I’d taken Monday off this week and on Tuesday I continued to work on the Speak For Yerself follow-on projects.  Last week I started working with the data and discovered that it wasn’t stored in a particularly consistent manner.  I overhauled the ‘lexis’ data and this week I performed a similar task for the ‘morphology’ and ‘phonology’ data.  I also engaged in email conversations with Jennifer and Mary about the data and how it will eventually be accessed by researchers, in addition to the general public. I then moved on to looking at the GeoJSON data that will be used to ascerta ..read more

I continued to make updates to the Books and Borrowing website this week after the soft launch last week.  I had noticed last week that the figures appearing on the ‘Facts’ page didn’t correlate with the number of results returned through the search facilities.  I reckoned this was because the ‘Facts’ page, which queries the database directly was not necessarily including the full chain of interrelated tables and their individual ‘isactive’ flags when returning figures whereas the search facilities use the Solr index, and the data stored within this were generated using the full chai ..read more