Tag: Periodicals

State of the Project, June 2023

A green landscape, looking out from a shady wooded area into a sunlit yard, with a large statement tree off to the right side and a wooden fence in the distance.

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

State of the Project, April 2022

Photo by Emily on Pexels.com

One of the reasons I started the blog was to give updates on progress and share discoveries as they come up, as well as offer transparency into what the process is of making a descriptive bibliography. In order to make that work, of course, it would help to show where we’re starting and what I’m working on at the moment. I’ll be putting up another post later to talk about how I’m doing the work, but for now, I’ll stick to in media res and get more into process later.

Current Status: As of this week, I have the completed the following:

  • Finished preliminary data gathering* for 11 titles, including:
    • Poems Upon Several Occasions
    • The Life of Harriot Stuart
    • The Female Quixote
    • Memoirs of the Duke of Sully
    • Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon
    • The Greek Theatre of Father Brumoy
    • Memoirs of the Countess of Berci
    • History of the Count de Comminge
    • Philander
    • Shakespear Illustrated
    • Euphemia
  • Started collecting data on Henrietta
  • Converted data from two of these titles into a combined spreadsheet for test purposes
  • Worked on learning how to use pivot tables to get interesting data
  • Created a test data set to start playing with Tableau to see about data visualizations, particularly those involving generating maps

*Publication of excerpts in periodicals remains a tricky point, as those are hard to track down.

Upcoming Tasks: Keep working on preliminary data, start verifying entries on library web sites, keep working on Excel and Tableau skills

Challenges: Periodical info, as mentioned above. Keep working on fleshing out this website with info and links. Manage to keep moving forward while I finish the semester and the grading.