The view from the back of my house
Greetings, gentle readers! The summer has almost returned, and I’m managing to make this post mid-month as opposed to nearly-done-month. Overall I’m quite pleased with my industry.
Insofar as the project goes, finishing the semester has done wonders for my ability to keep working on my data. I completed working on the Marquis de Sully finally and was able to likewise finish Old City Manners, Philander, Poems Upon Several Occasions*, and Shakespear Illustrated, the latter just this evening. I’m very happy with the rate of progress I’m making.
In addition to working through the data and cleaning it up, I’m currently trying to work through two different problems. The first thing I’m trying to sort out is regarding periodical reprints of Lennox’s work. I want to catalog not simply the stand-alone volumes of her works, but also the various reprints, both partial and complete, of her work in periodicals of the time. The problem is, how do I track them? Using the Lennox bibliography in Susan Carlile’s book, Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind, I have a list of excerpts in various publications.
The question, though is this: 1) is that actually all of them? and 2) (and this is a big one) how do I treat these periodicals within the same project as more traditional codex books? Lennox even had her own periodical, The Lady’s Museum. The same periodical may have (and in some cases does have) multiple samples from her various works across time. How do I record that data so that nothing is lost and yet I’m also not doubling my own effort? It’s not that this is a particularly complicated problem; it’s just that the solution I pick will necessarily inform the shape of the project as it goes, so I’d rather do my best to choose something that won’t cause problems later if I can.
The next issue, mostly unrelated to the above procedural quandary, is how to set up my database so that different records can have the same title without it being a gigantic mess. This is actually the easier one to answer, most likely, as I’m sure I’m not the first person building a relational data structure to have multiple entries with the same name, for example, but different data attached to each one. I’m working on doing some reading and I’ve got some feelers out with some data-oriented DBA people I know, and I’ll likely have an answer to this later this month. Once I do, I can keep working on the structure on my Heurist database and importing the material I’ve currently got in spreadsheets. In the meantime, I’ll keep working on the organization and getting the location data sorted, with the goal of being finished with it and organizing the next phase of the project by the fall, aka library fellowship application season.
Current Data Category: Shakespear Illustrated
# of entries in this category to date: 126
# of entries in the worksheet so far: 2140 and counting
Lennox Bibliography Project 