Scots Words and Place-names

SWAP’s social media persona has been attempting to communicate with the public on a range of issues relating to Scots words and Scots place-names.

Questions on Facebook have ranged from which words people use for alcohol to informal, unofficial names for Scottish places and the people who live in them. Perhaps even more interesting have been the off-topic discussions begun by Facebook users themselves on the page. These have already provided the impetus for new questions.

So far, Twitter seems to be working better as an information dissemination tool than as a data-gatherer. But this is still valuable and may change as the project progresses. We have Twapperkeeper quietly churning away in the background, producing a Twitter archive which will continue to expand as the months go on.

Photo Credit: James Cridland

The publicity about Scots Words and Place-names has extended to the (virtual) pages of the Guardian. An article by Alastair Dunning, SWAP’s Programme Manager at JISC, mentioning the project appeared on the Guardian’s Higher Education Network blog on Friday 29^th July. This was originally published in Research Information. In it, he discusses the effect that crowd-sourcing is having on research. Rather than concluding that it is dumbing it down (which the Guardian headline seems to suggest), he discusses a range of projects where opening up the process of data-gathering has had a powerful impact on how academic research is viewed by the public. Involving the public from the beginning of a project may produce significantly wider involvement and interest in a project’s outcomes, well beyond the traditional academic sphere.

The Scots Words and Place-names school competition has officially begun! This is open to every school pupil in Scotland and asks pupils to write a short story, poem or piece of discursive writing clearly relating to the Scots language and/or Scots place-names.

The intention behind running this competition as part of the SWAP project is to encourage children and teachers to engage with Scots and encounter the language within the school environment. Giving teachers the opportunity to use the competition to bring Scots into their classrooms ties in well with the ethos of the Curriculum for Excellence, which has recently been introduced throughout the Scottish school system and which encourages teachers to be flexible and creative in their approach.

The competition is being run using the Glow schools network. Billed as “the world’s first national intranet for education” by Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS), the portal provides an opportunity to reach every pupil and teacher in Scotland within a safe and supported online environment. As SWAP has a competition page on Glow, rather than simply a set of instructions for entry, this has meant that we have been able to provide worksheets and lesson suggestions for use in the classroom and links to other online resources relating to the Scots language and Scots place-names. Entrants can also upload their competition entry directly to the site. LTS have helped greatly with this process, with particular thanks going to Dawn Adams on the Glow team.

The use of the Glow platform also allows us to trial an innovative form of judging. The initial sifting of the entries will be carried out by our judging panel, including the novelists Louise Welsh and Amal Chatterjee, who will choose three finalists in each of four age groups. However, we plan that the final decision will be made by the school community themselves through peer-voting. After the summer holidays, pupils and teachers will have the opportunity to read the finalists’ entries on Glow and vote for their favourites.

So lots more work to be done before the winners can be announced, but the entries so far are already bringing smiles to our faces here at SWAP.  We’ve just had some in discussing the word ‘bahookie’…

As the Scots Words and Place-names blog is now up and running and we are getting into the swing of blogging, I will add a couple of earlier blogs/research diary entries which we couldn’t publish electronically at the time. It seems a shame to let them go to waste, and they do offer a nice flavour of the project. So then, we delve deep into the SWAP archives…

12 May 2011

It’s a great day! Our twitter ID is up and running with an – I think – rather beautiful and – I hope – not too fusty Johannes Blaeu map of Scotland as a backdrop to the page. Marc Alexander – who is the RA on the JISC-funded Parliamentary Discourse project – has worked his visual magic and provided us with a very handsome logo which looks excellent as a twitter avatar.

The University of Glasgow’s web presence is in the process of being updated to reflect the restructuring of the Uni that took place recently and so there has been some delay in getting our basic info site up. Nonetheless, we have now got a web page up under the smart new system: here. The rest of our web site, with underlying databases, etc, is being developed and should be up and running very soon.

At the moment however our attention is mainly on the imminent Schools Competition. We have had loads of help with this from Elaine Webster at Scottish Language Dictionaries, one of our project partners. LTS Scotland and Glasgow Uni’s own Education Dept have also provided lots of input, and the Dept of Scottish Literature have imparted sage advice garnered from their experience of running a school comp for the Burns 250th anniversary. Nonetheless, there is still plenty to do before the launch on the 1st June.

Today we have tweeted our first tweet (we are @Scotswap), enlisted the help of novelist Amal Chatterjee to help with selecting finalists from the competition entries we receive, and are busily contacting likely candidates to help us give our social networks a bit of a splash on radio, in the papers, and – only if we’re very lucky – on tv.

16th May 2011

Today we’ve been contacting media outlets to see how best to splash the project. High hopes for Radio Scotland and the Daily Record. We’ve recruited our friends to get us the 25 ‘likes’ we need on facebook to get a short url for it. We’ve been stretching our private social network to try and get judges for the Schools Competition, and our fingers are crossed in hope of getting Scotland’s Makar to be one of them. Also we have begun contacting various people and groups with an interest in Scots to seed interest in the project and the competition.