Recently I've been spending most of my time on data entry. I won't have as much time in November-December for data entry because I have several conferences to attend. With that in mind, I have been trying to get ahead of my schedule so that I still meet my target for completing this stage of the research. This week I passed an important milestone: I have now processed half of the reviews. Celebrating such milestones is an important aspect of doctoral research, breaking the terror of thinking about one massive project looming over you for three years, but I often forget to take the time. Sharing updates with friends and family helps me pause and reflect on my progress.
The database now contains:
560 places (was 430 in April)
1,206 authors (same as April)
1,594 books (this has decreased slightly since April as some books weren't A&R publications)
1,670 newspapers (was 1,200 in April)
1,029 reviewers (a new category)
603 booksellers/agents located in 5 countries (a new category)
Creating and populating the last two record types has been an exciting development. The inclusion of booksellers was particularly interesting. A&R was sending some of their review copies to the newspapers via booksellers. Many reviews name specific local booksellers as the source of their copy or encourage people to buy the book from a designated local store. To address this, I created distributor fields in the review records allowing me to 'point' to the bookseller that passed on the copy to that newspaper. Preliminary analysis of these fields reveals important details about A&R's promotional strategies. It also reveals the existence of bookstores in small towns across the country and their relationships with other literary actors, evidencing the strength of the Australian book trade at this time. The role of A&R in this process is also highly visible, contributing to the idea that A&R was actively working to foster collegiality in the trade. I'm intrigued to see what eventuates from this discovery as I continue working on the reviews.
I also applied to present at two conferences (one for a prerecorded 5minute lightning talk, and one for a traditional 20minute paper) and submitted my first academic article (based on my MRes research) to a journal for consideration. Preparing written work for the abstracts and article was a nice change of pace, allowing me to take some time away from the manual data entry which can become monotonous when done day-in-day-out.