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8. Building a book history database: A novice voice

  • Rebekah Ward (author)
Chapter of: Digital Humanities in the India Rim: Contemporary Scholarship in Australia and India(pp. 147–172)

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Metadata
Title8. Building a book history database
SubtitleA novice voice
ContributorRebekah Ward (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0423.08
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0423/chapters/10.11647/obp.0423.08
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightRebekah Ward
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2024-11-06
Long abstractThis chapter recounts my lived experience as a novice Digital Humanist. It is deliberately anecdotal, rather than theoretical, in style and form. The chapter tells the story of how I commenced a doctorate in the field of book history, then, with minimal technical training, came to build a large relational database that both enabled and complemented my written dissertation as well as providing value for future users. My research is centred on Angus & Robertson, the largest 20th-century Australian bookseller and publishing house. I was particularly interested in Angus & Robertson’s use of book reviews as a promotional tool. The company archive contains millions of miscellaneous documents and, even when limited to certain subsets, there were thousands of undigitised pages to interrogate. In response to that scale, I turned to the Digital Humanities, using the Heurist platform to design a bespoke database schema then populate the requisite fields with metadata from the physical documents, and subsequently enriching the records with secondary research. The resultant Angus & Robertson Book Reviews Database, which has been published online, remains a living database that at the time of writing contains 152,000 records, each with several fields, amounting to over a million data points.In this chapter, I explain design decisions as well as obstacles that I encountered whilst building the database without prior technical skills. I also share how the database has allowed me to tell previously untold stories about Angus & Robertson, book reviewing, and the 20th-century Australian print industry. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ongoing potential of this specific database and how platforms like Heurist extend important opportunities to novice Digital Humanists.
Page rangepp. 147–172
Print length26 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Rebekah Ward

(author)
PhD Research student at Western Sydney University

Dr Rebekah Ward has recently completed her PhD. Her research focuses on the history of print culture, particularly the 20th century book trade. Rebekah’s doctorate, which blends traditional archival research with Digital Humanities approaches, explores how Angus & Robertson used book reviews as a promotional tool. She has published in Australian Literary Studies, Publishing History and History, and presented widely across cognate fields of publishing studies, Digital Humanities and Australian history.

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