First of all, I am so very pleased to announce that I’ve received the 2022-2023 Helen F. Faust Women’s Writers Research Award from the Penn State Special Collections library. I’ll be traveling to the Eberly Family Special Collections Library next week to dig into their Charlotte Lennox holdings, starting the archival research in earnest. All my deepest thanks to the Penn State Libraries for helping fund this travel and research, and I can’t wait to see what we find!
The amusing part of all this, of course, is that — proceeding in an orderly planned fashion — I assumed next summer would be the beginning of my archival research, and I had tons of time to plan out the scope and types of data and do some trial runs on local holdings. And thus, to paraphrase the poets, does fate make fools of us all. I’m therefore doing all my data planning this week, then, and figuring out how I’m going to record it, what I want to take note of, where I want to store it, and how I’m going to eventually put it all together, as least to the extent that I can without having done it (which means it’ll absolutely change between now and later).
I’m recording the trials and tribulations of the project, by the way, not because I particularly feel they’re worthy of recording for the sake of the project, but because I want people who take on similar projects to be able to look back at this and know they aren’t alone. I believe very strongly in breaking out of the strictures of “professionalism” and the gatekeeping they enact. To be “professional” too often means to speak only of your successes, downplay your failures or challenges, and deny weakness or missteps. The parts we edit out, though, in order to achieve that seamless appearance, are where the opportunities for growth and the useful case studies for others happen to be. I’m under no illusion that this blog will be a source of fascinating reading material for a huge audience, but my hope is that for those who need it or like it, it will serve to light their own path a little, if only dimly.
Back to business. I’ve finished importing The Life of Harriot Stuart and I’ve been working on Henrietta for a while now — see previous posts about the better selling books taking far longer. I’ve also added the Henrietta maps to the website. As a note, this process of importing might take longer than one would ostensibly wish, but it’s already helped me locate some discrepancies and repeated data points, which I am correcting in the maps as well when I find them. I’ve also discovered, for anyone playing along at home, that my KMZ-to-CSV converter does not know what to do with a layer in Google Maps that has symbols in it, like ” or , or so forth. It therefore simply does not extract that layer, which means I have to go in and enter it by hand (which fortunately I can do, having the maps to hand). Things to know for the future, I suppose.
Next up: Finish Henrietta, move on to the next item on the list, travel, do archival stuff, take lots of notes and images, start creating the archive!
Lennox Bibliography Project 