From mid-March Australia started to shut down in response to the escalating global pandemic. As an introvert undertaking humanities research whilst living in the middle of nowhere, I tend to isolate well. As long as my tea supply remains uninterrupted, I am doing okay.
But bush living does mean restricted satellite internet and non-existence mobile reception which presented challenges in this new world. At least I had no need for virtual backgrounds when joining Zoom meetings.
For me the biggest obstacle was the closure of the State Library of NSW on 23 March 2020. From that moment I was unable to access any of the archival records. Like everyone else in the world I suddenly needed to figure out what to do for the next few months.
I had planned to spend at least the first eight months of my PhD immersed in the archive, photographing relevant materials and starting the process of data entry. When the Library closed I was only six weeks into the project, so had only seen a small proportion of the collection. It has been an anxious period, grappling with the health implications as well as the possibility of having to defer my position. I spoke at length with my supervisors to design a solution. We decided I would press on with designing the database. We knew if the Library was closed for too long I would need to reassess the scope of my project, which I was reluctant to do.
Using the materials I had already seen as a guide, I started to construct the initial database structures. I am using Heurist, an open-source platform designed for humanities research. As a starting point I created entities for authors, books, places, newspapers/periodicals, and reviews. It was necessary to set up unique 'record pointer' fields to link these entity types. For example, the 'author' field in the books record needed to link directly to a record for that author.
I was able to use the State Library catalogue of the collection to create a list of books that appeared in the review scrapbooks. From here, I have been using some remarkable electronic databases – particularly AustLit, Trove, PapersPast, and ADB – to enrich my data. I had always intended to input basic bibliographic data for the books (such as author, book genre, publication date, and place of publication). But with unexpected time on my hands I have been adding other elements such as author biography (including gender, life-dates, and profession) and the latitude/longitude coordinates for each place of publication (using GeoNames).
This process has proven particularly advantageous for the newspaper and periodicals. Using digital newspaper repositories and various secondary sources I have been able to find information about the place of publication, periodicity, affiliations, names of known editors and proprietors, run dates, and digitisation dates. This detailed contextual information – which will (hopefully) prove useful when analysing my data – would not have been possible at this stage if I had progressed with my original plan.
Having constructed the database structure and enriched the records I could start uploading the data. This was a steep learning curve but the Heurist software is fairly user-friendly and thankfully doesn't require a background in coding. I have successfully been able to step myself through the processes for uploading data and linking relational fields. It's been exciting and satisfying to see the first lot of records in the database.
At this stage my database contains:
430 places of publication located in 25 different countries, complete with geocoding
1,800 books with associated bibliographic data
1,200 authors, enriched with basic biographical information
1,200 newspapers and periodicals
The ongoing Library closure has obviously impeded the progression of my research and will continue to do so. The longer the closures continue, the more concerned I am about the viability of my project. But the lockdown has also presented an opportunity to enrich my database in ways I had not originally conceived. In the current situation, I think it is important to recognise any positives that present themselves.
Comments