Tulips from my garden before the deer ate them.
Here it is, the middle of May already. Where is the April post, you may ask? Well, the April post sadly went the way of the rest of my month of April, swallowed whole by the end of the semester and grading. I got nothing done on the project to speak of in April, though I did find my way into some interesting discoveries.
At the beginning of April/end of March, I attended the ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies) annual conference, this year held in St. Louis. While I was there I went to a fantastic panel (okay, many fantastic panels) but this one in particular discussed a very interesting potential path forward for the Lennox project. This panel included a paper by Norbert Schürer (CSULB), who was discussing a digital humanities project being created using the Heurist platform — a customizable relational database system that was designed for Humanities research. The platform is free to use, hosted by the University of Sydney. It is based in MySQL, which means that it’s easy to export to somewhere else for hosting or other purposes, and it’s going to be simple to transfer to new homes and interfaces down the line. It can also generate a website interface and has mapping and network visualization capabilities.
No one else has, up to date, used the platform for a descriptive bibliography, so a lot of the relationships and information types I need for my project do not yet exist. Before I start putting in extensive book data, however, I want to take the information I do have and create a locational database that takes the map data sets I’ve created and pulls it together for more effective research planning. To that end, I’ve created a test database and been futzing around with it in my spare time, which has not been terribly plentiful over the past month but should ease up considerably over the summer.
I was torn for a time on how to proceed, as it might be less time consuming simply to switch over to inputting data into the database directly. I think I’ve decided, though, to continue putting entries into the spreadsheets for now while I try to figure out the structures I need in Heurist and build something useful. To that end, I’ve started inputting data again and am nearly done with the Marquis de Sully, which is a relief. I’ll keep you posted on how it all goes.
Current Data Category: Memoirs of the Duke de Sully translation
# of entries in this category to date: 953
# of entries in the worksheet so far: 1505 and counting
Lennox Bibliography Project 