Cædmon Citation Network - Week 4
Hello!
This blog comes to you a day later than usual, as Friday’s work ended up taking a lot longer than I thought and I ran out of time! To be honest, this week was spent much like last week: checking our Zotero bibliography against other bibliographies of Cædmon scholarship.
I ended up re-doing a bit of my work from last week, as I learned in my meeting with Dan on Monday that our scope was a bit wider than I had previously thought. I was worried that I had not been considering certain entries in the various bibliographies to be “about Cædmon enough”, so I decided to go through the entries again and add some that I may have missed. It makes sense to add more rather than less, as I can simply remove an article from the list if I read it and realise it has nothing to do with Cædmon. At the moment our bibliography is almost complete, and we have nearly 700 entries!
What are we going to do with this giant list of articles and books? Well, firstly I have to acquire access to each entry, either via JSTOR, inter-library loans, or through one of our library’s other databases. Then I read through EVERYTHING and count each quote and mention of Cædmon and note which of the approximately sixty different editions of the Hymn are cited. We have also decided to try and note every other citation as well. For example if one article about “Cædmon’s Hymn” cites a book about the history of peanut butter sandwiches, I will take note of it, as there may be other pieces of Cædmon scholarship that also cite that book about the history of peanut butter sandwiches. It will be interesting to see if there are identifiable relationships between writing about Cædmon and seemingly unrelated topics – not peanut-butter-sandwich-history obviously, I just haven’t eaten breakfast yet so I am giving you a delicious example.
How am I going to keep track of all this? Good question! We will need a database that I can use to mark down each citation as I come across them in my reading. On Monday Dan and I discussed at length what we will need from this database, and how we would like it to work. At first we were hoping something on Google Forms would do the trick for us, however we discovered as we talked that we need more control over our information than this tool would allow.
One problem emerged when we realised that among our gigantic list of 700 articles (and books, etc) we would find certain works that were actually editions of the Hymn not included in our original list of editions. We would need a way to add this piece to the Editions list… Several other concerns were raised as well, but to be honest I am finding them difficult to explain without drawing you all a little picture. (I should ask Dan how to add images to these blog posts!)
I mentioned at some point that I would pick the brain of my boyfriend, Garret Johnson, who has his degree in Computer Science from the University of Lethbridge and is my go-to person whenever I have a question about these sorts of things. Dan suggested that he could hire Garret to build our database if he would be willing, as someone with a programming background could probably produce what we need a lot faster than either Dan or I working on it ourselves. So that is our current plan! Garret will begin building us a database that will suit our needs and my job for next week will be to start acquiring the 700 articles and books on our list. By the end of next week I am sure I will have thoroughly annoyed the librarians at school with the amount of inter-library loans I will be requesting.
Until next week!
Colleen
