The Nightmare Before Christmas; or The Trials and Rewards of Building a Database—Marie Léger-St-Jean
Channel: Marie Léger-St-Jean
Date: 2020-11-02

Marie Léger-St-Jean presents "The Nightmare Before Christmas; or The Trials and Rewards of Building a Database" to the Five College Book History Seminar (Massachusetts, USA) on October 28, 2020. She received the 2020 Field Development Grant from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) and is a member of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP).

Price One Penny: A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837-1860: http://priceonepenny.info

Five College Book History Seminar: https://www.umass.edu/renaissance/five-college-book-history-seminar


Based on her 10 years working on Price One Penny, Marie (http://pronoun.is/she) gets into the bibliographic intricacies of penny bloods, which are often undated, anonymous (or with bylines if you're lucky!). Step by step, she presents how she structured her MySQL database to be able to record all available information (e.g. title-page/first number/running titles) separately from inferences, rather than have just a spreadsheet with one row per book and columns like title, author, publisher, date.

The advantages of a custom-built database become clear for bringing together two different bibliographic formats: stand-alone serials and serials in periodicals (with titles potentially appearing in both formats). The hard work of digital humanities pays off when it illuminates a transnational transmedial cross-class culture.

After an introduction to database design and the material she has been working with, Marie zooms into 3 case studies:
- Edward Lloyd’s Unpopular Bloods; or, The Virtues of Distant Reading.
- What Is Original Fiction Anyways? or, the Rewards of Database Normalization.
- What Is a Work? or, FRBRizing POP.

The slides are available at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ndjg4gsk9p9NLHBvRmkIPNFAG-c7b-EQ1D_LqrJirak/edit?usp=sharing