Why change? And into what?

So far we used to work on two Excel spreadsheets, which did neither contain complete information nor structured them in a reasonable and machine-readable way.

We tried hard to come to a more logical model, which would make it possible for a software like Gephi to visualize our data.

Our ReadingData folder contains a helper folder, where you find the data dictionary, which is important to look up under any circumstances, as it defines the possible content and format of any cell in our database. Apart from the helper folder you’ll find our actual data. Those are related to each other and shall therefore be solely designated with their ID (aka key).

We’ve got the following tables:

Act The act table is probably the most important innovation in our database model. It basically connects our two former tables, i.e. the text table and the persons table. Every single act is a new line, i.e. every exchange of goods, every reading experience of a certain book, any copying and distribution of a text by a person. Therefore there are no potential limits regarding the number of entries. We therefore have four basic entities: The subject (usually reader, copier, distributor), the action type itself (reading, copying, distributing), the material object and the receiving person.

ActType This table defines the different action types. They can be amended.

Genre This table strives to be comprehensive, yet if you encounter something which is not covered, please add the Genre in your branch.

Institution Another new table is the Institution table, which covers groups of people and corporate bodies. How do we include several persons?

1. to be continued