The impending closure of botsin.space forces me to rethink what kind of service is appropriate for posting the daily Scottish Lost Places items. These posts are the outcome of a program which queries Read more
Towns and their trades
After a conversation about the decline in Scotland's fishing industry, I posted to Mastodon about the lack of Wikidata to support analysis of places by current or former industry. I am suggesting Read more
Hydro-electric and wind power stations
I began looking at the Wikidata information on hydro-electric power stations, whose development was a feature of 20th century Scotland. Some of the date information is scant, and some is Read more
CSS visuals
I started trying out ChartsCSS for visualising the data returned from staged queries in the browser, for example starting with selection from a pull-down of areas then displaying numeric results for Read more
Postwar rail network contraction
Today was the first actual return from the Bot program which seeks to present On this Day information on the closures of Scottish railway stations. The first former station was Alyth Junction between Read more
Inventors
After passing the John Logie Baird statue on the front at Helensburgh, I put together a query on inventors. But, whether seen on a map, a table or a graph, I am not sure this tells anything. What is Read more
Distilleries
After looking at a couple of Articles for Deletion on Wikipedia, I began looking at the information on Wikidata about distilleries, bonded warehouses, etc., and generated a map. Then I began to Read more
Postwar rail network contraction
Creating an on-this-day Mastodon post to highlight the loss of an area service (usually associated with the Beeching cuts) has needed additional activity to extract information held in Wikipedia and Read more
Civic manufactures
In the 19th century several Scottish iron foundries became well-known for producing standardised objects, particularly civic fountains and bandstands. This Wikimedia Commons page utilises Listeria Read more
Capital punishment
Adjusting the Wikidata records for those executed after the 1820 Radical War led me to a broader query on the grim topic of people in Scotland who were subjected to judicial killing. Here is a map Read more