Elsie Dwyer
Maja Vukosavljevic
Jenny Luczak
Editing the Time Line
On the time line, fix errors of non-attribution of a magazine title, genre,
author, topic, etc.
One of the first things we decided to do was make sure that all of the magazine titles were uniform. We went through them, changing those entries that said "Scribner's Magazine" rather than "Scribner's" or "Tyro" rather than "The Tyro" or "DANA" rather than "Dana." Then set off to take care of the dates. As per the instructions we received about writing out the dates at the beginning of the semester, I added the first month and the first of the month where they were missing for those yearly and monthly magazines. Then, I tackled the genres section.
One of the biggest problems was in describing the pieces of art. What one might consider a sketch another might consider a drawing. It was difficult to tell what was a painting from the images, and some users are more exact than others in defining the pieces. Some had written that they were paintings, others watercolors, others drawings or sketches, sculptures or pictures of sculptures. It was a mess. We decided to, as we had done with the tags, make it as user friendly and simple as possible: Art. If one wanted to get more specific in searching through the fields of art they could always use the magazine titles, tags, and artists. Furthermore, we hoped that the descriptions, which we left unedited so as to preserve the authenticity of our classmates work as well as for grading purposes, could offer the kind of specific information a searcher might need. Also, because we have included all the URLs, they could simply look at the piece directly.
Another problem I ran into was "Editorial" and "Editorial Comment" and "Editorial Content." I changed all of these to "Editorial," and "Essay" or "Letter" again, to keep it as simple and easy as possible for searches. This covers everything from Blast manifestos to Harriet Monroe's pieces in Poetry, which are often described as such: "Editorial; Essay." With the Blast piece "To Suffragettes," which could be described as a letter or an essay, as with much of the work of Blast, I described it as "Editorial; Essay; Letter." This way it will come up in a number or searches. It is difficult to define what much of the non-poem written work of Blast is, as it fits into so many genres. So we kept it as wide as possible.
"Article" or "Essay" became confusing. What is the difference between them? We decided that an article is written by a staff writer. But students cannot be expected to figure out who worked for the magazine, and establish the point of the piece, so I changed all of them to "Essay." If one is looking for a long body of text written by anyone they should search the "Essay" field. If it is not a poem or a play or an art, it's an essay. We also considered that an essay can be an article, but an article is not always an essay. Celebrity gossip, for instance, could be considered an article, but not an essay. It might be argued that this is not true, that celebrity gossip can support a thesis with implicating evidence, and it is perhaps for this reason that we felt it fit--if not counter intuitive--to combine the two as Essay.
"Poem and Illustration" and "Story and Illustration" were changed to "Story; Art" or "Poem; Art." I also added "Art" as a tag where it was needed for these pieces.
Though it only appeared once, Jenny had entered an entry about a Walt Whitman quote that appeared in the back pages of Poetry. Assuming that this is significant enough to stand alone for now, and assuming that there will eventually be others to be entered in, I left this as a genre.
Other small-scale changes included making sure each entry said "Advertisement" rather an "Advertising" or "Story" rather than "Short Story." We left "Poem" and "Play" obviously, as well as "Novel" for serialized novels, which are obviously different from "Story" and Jenny's many entries about "Cover Art" and "Magazine Emblem" (Well, somebody has to blaze the trail here).
Simplify tags that are close variants of another term, either by spelling or meaning and correct errors of multiple tag allocation.
By July our class had named pictures and prose in the modernist journals in over thirty different ways. Some of the finer choices included Fish, Grape Nuts, Breasts and Ham while others were more specific: Feminism, Female Identity, Drunkard and Misogyny. As you can see, we covered quite a bit of territory. To scale down the tags, we grouped things together into broader categories as best we could, and left some of the genre section to fill in details where appropriate. What follows is a list of some of the combining we did, and why:
Change includes Tradition, Progression, and really any piece that touches on the subject of movement, good or bad.
Visual entries are cataloged under Art if the entry contains your own interpretation, i.e. the picture may relate to society or religion, these are added as extra tags.
In many cases the way the cataloger is using the prose or image determines the way it is categorized: Many of the advertisements, for instance, were characterized with reference to an the thesis of an essay. This occurred often in the case of Gender which we have expanded here to include men, women, feminism, female identity, etc.
Something tagged as Society talks about human nature or relationship between humans in groups, Culture does pretty much the same thing, but also specifies a country or culture
Why use the term Emotional Distress? Because that is simply what some poems are about: identity crisis or utter sadness. In this case you've got to call it what it is.
Age includes poems, prose or Art concerning both Youth and Old Age.
Although there was an Imperialism category, it was the only type of government which was specified while other entries were tagged as Society which could have been tagged as Government. For a while we had a Government category and an Imperialism category, but later combined them.
Epistemology and Existentialism? There are no lies here, Epistemology was the tag of one particular gardener, and she thinks it fits that particular play perfectly. Sartre would probably have a fit over this, nonetheless, its use indicates that the piece discusses some element of existence: time, our understanding of ourselves, etc.
Modernity is included in particular art selections because they refer to "modern art"pieces (as in the Tyro) or are visual copies of such pieces. The instance in "Le Petite Journal de Refusee" is used because the image refers to contemporary writers.
Vorticism and Cubism were under debate as to whether they should be a Tag or a Genre. Ultimately, it was decided since both could and often are both used in describing one entry, they should be given Tag status so that any given entry could be implicated in both categories (on the time line, only one genre entry can be made for each entry).
Unmentioned entries have been considered unique enough in that which they describe about the entry so as not to be clumped into something larger just yet. Each is additionally self explanatory for the purpose of tagging in the future. Lastly, and for the record: Grape Nuts and Ham were moved into the Advertisement tag, as that's what they were. Breasts has naturally been relocated to Nudity.
Fill in tags for any items that you notice to be missing and fixing the URLs
We carefully went through all the URLs to ensure accurate linking to the actual documents. Our job was two fold: filling in missing URLs and correcting incorrect ones. Where URLs were missing we had to reference the coordinates provided to us such as magazine, volume, edition and page number to locate the correct URL. If these happened to be inaccurate then a more laborious approach was taken and we searched through the “content” page on the MJP page for the title indicated on the feed spreadsheet.
Incorrect URLs such as “tiny URLs” which compress longer URLs were removed and replaced with the original. URLs ending with .pdf were also removed and replaced. These .pdf URLs lead to the enlarged PDF pages were deemed not as useful because they lead to a specific page of the magazine independent from the rest of it versus putting it into perspective to the remainder of the magazine. If only the PDF is there, people will not have access to the website from your image and cannot see the the magazine that exists around the text, which is often times of equal importance.
Lastly we re-visited the URLs to ensure that the correct page numbers were indicated on the time line. When going through the incorrect and missing URLs we noticed that some of our classmates were noting the number of the “thumbnails” versus the actual page numbers within the journals. We thought this warranted our attention as well.
When correcting the URLs we also paid attention to weather or not the correct titles were used on the time line. There were a few instances of people naming things incorrectly. For example there was one piece that was titled “poem” versus the actual name, etc.
In conclusion, we found editing the time line to be a slow and meticulous process. When something was noticed wrong on the actual time line, it was often difficult to find the error in the time line. The find and replace option was offered near the end of the project which was of a great help, but also dangerous since it searches the whole document the replace all option could not be used at the risk of changing words found in bodies of text other than the tags or genres section. Something can also be said for some guidelines in what is grouped at a tag and what is grouped as a genre. We have provided some here from our research, but a more unified method would be very helpful. If the archivist had an option to refer two genres to one topic independently of one another it would give the genres section more versatility in defining the specifics while the tags sections could be used for general categories.
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