Week Beginning 17th August 2026

I continued to work on the DOST Auld Laws project on Monday and Tuesday this week.  My first task was to implement the tag selection for the Advanced Search.  As discussed last week, this section allows users to either include or exclude tags from their searches, or limit their search to only look at the contents of one of more specified tags.  Luca has already created the XML search options that would allow this, and my job was therefore to process the user’s selections, format the query and connect to the XML.  I managed to complete this on Monday and it’s now possible to construct a query such as “find all occurrences of words beginning ‘ȝe’ in ‘Edzell Doouments’ excluding any text found in ‘Expanded Forms’, Aitken Notes and Other Notes”.  It’s also possible to press on the ‘Refine your search’ button to return to the search form and the search criteria will be remembered in the form.  I also added in a ‘Clear’ button.

I continued working on the site on Tuesday.  I added a ‘Cite’ option to the search result page, which allows users to share or cite a particular page of a search, including the ordering.  I also added a help popup about the tag selection to the search form and I integrated the ‘show all Aitken notes’ query with the Advanced Search.  This is a special case that returns the full contents of all notes by Aitken across all or a selection of documents without the need to supply any search text.  Information about how to do this appears in the help popup as follows:

“To retrieve all Aitken Notes enter a dash (-) into the search box, select documents (if required), set Aitken Notes to Limit to content in this tag and press the search button.  This will display the full contents of all Aitken notes in your chosen documents.”

The Aitken Note results are a bit different to the regular results as they return the full contents of each tag, not a KWIC.  Therefore all of the text is highlighted in yellow and the sorting by left and right of the term doesn’t do anything, as there is nothing left or right.

Whilst working on the Advanced Search I’d spotted that the advanced search KWIC (KeyWord In Context) was not crossing line boundaries, meaning that when a work is found at the beginning of a line no contextual text is returned before this.  This is different to the Quick Search, which ignores line boundaries and is not ideal, as it means the search results are inconsistent and the quick search actually gives better results than the advanced search.  Thankfully Luca was able to find a solution to this and to make the advanced search results consistent with the quick search.

I’ve now pretty much done all I can do for this project until I hear back from Joanna, who is going to supply ancillary content and edited XML files.

I spent a lot of the rest of the week working on the HiMuJe Malabar project, continuing to develop the map.  On Thursday I attended a meeting with Ophira, Renu and project Co-I Ines, who is in Glasgow from Germany for a while to work on the project.  We had a very productive meeting and we now have a much clearer idea about how the travel routes and other aspects of the map will function.

In terms of actual development of the map, this week I fixed an issue with the travel routes whereby when multiple travel routes are selected, deselecting one would remove all locations, even those that were associated with another active route.  This took quite some time to sort out, unfortunately, but it’s fixed now and the routes work a lot better.

I then set about making it possible to share or cite the selected travel routes, also noting whether unrelated places have been hidden or not.  This required some major reworking of the code to ensure that these options are added to the URL and when the page loads that the options are taken from the URL and processed.  The citation text also needed to include information about the selections too, and any location selected when the route is active can also be cited, e.g.

“HiMuJe Malabar Digital Map: Satellite map, travel routes menu, showing the travel route ‘The migration of Jews and Christians in the Qissa’, with unrelated places hidden, placenames categorised by type / subtype, placename record for Mecca. 2026. In HiMuJe Malabar. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. Retrieved 19 August 2026”

At the meeting we decided what icons to use for the location categorisation so on Friday I returned to the map legend to rework this.  I started off by slightly reworking the data to ensure that all locations had both a type and a subtype, as a few locations only had the former.  This meant creating a new ‘Area’ type and making ‘Region’ a subtype of this, whereas previously ‘Region’ was the type.  The reason for doing this is so that the legend could be grouped by type, giving each type a count of the total number of locations contained across all subtypes and to include a checkbox for each type that when pressed on would select and deselect all subtypes.

That was the plan, anyway, but unfortunately I had a very frustrating day and didn’t manage to get this working by the end of it.  The difficulty is that Leaflet generates and processes the legend internally based on the map layers and trying to hook into this and change the default behaviour is very difficult.  I managed to get the ‘Type’ checkboxes to select and deselect all corresponding ‘Subtype’ checkboxes but doing so was not actually triggering any changes on the map – the corresponding map layers were not being affected when the checkboxes changed even though manually pressing on the checkboxes did trigger the layer change.  I’m afraid I ran out of time with this and didn’t manage to find a solution.  For now the types are just headings in the legend without associated checkboxes, which is a bit of a shame but I just don’t have the time at the moment to look into this further.

Also this week I made a few more tweaks to the data for the Burns Supper Map, including adding in a new batch of images, discussed migrating a couple of sites to our third-party hosting supplier, read a document ahead of next week’s DSL meeting and read some information Deven Parker had sent me about a funding bid.