Data Management and Hyperbibliography
Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2015
This pivotal chapter describes the organization of the entire material of the website in an intri... more This pivotal chapter describes the organization of the entire material of the website in an intricate structure of files and folders. These are basically on two planes: back-end files feeding material to the computer, and front-end files directly accessed by the user. There were also some files of an administrative nature, keeping track of work flow and flow of materials while the project was executed. The chapter begins with the immense task of human management, the vast volume and variety of material, and the way it was acquired, before coming to the actual file management. The file structure also provided the basis for the bibliography. There is a comparison between a traditional print bibliography and an electronic hyperbibliography, and the challenges of marshalling material for the latter from the huge Tagore corpus. The English works provided some special challenges. The entire data retrieval system for Bichitra rests on a raft of 32 spreadsheets, 12 underlying the Browse menu and 20 the Bibliography menu. Intermediate spreadsheets had to be created to generate these 32. The structure of these spreadsheets is described in detail, along with the principle of naming the files and folders. The results are conveyed to the user through an Alphabetical Index and a Full Table; also, for the English works, a Master List. The chapter also gives an account of the Timeline added later to the site.
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Papers by Debapriya Basu
Whitney’s text combines elements of the mother’s legacy genre and the
romantic verse epistle to reclaim the urban spaces that she is forced to renounce as she leaves the city for lack of work. The text is possibly one of the earliest in which the desire for the individual (jobless, unmarried, female) to inhabit her chosen space, to take back the city for herself as it were, is articulated in such unambiguous terms. The poem employs two
central conceits. It figures London as an unfaithful lover even as it imagines the unwilling renunciation of a desired abode as corporeal death. Whitney’s declared persona is absolutely altern from perspectives of class, gender and subject position. This lower-class virgin female
body on the deathbed is strategically used to inscribe the geography of the city in a verbal blazon of unusual depth and variety. In Lefebvrian terms, within the conceptual space of Whitney’s city, ‘moments’ of experience and affect are embodied geographically through an oppositional use of the discourse of heteronormative love. Using theories and discursive categories revolving around the politics of space, I argue that this female-authored Early Modern text can be seen as enacting the perceived spaces of the city through the conceptual mapping of its physical presence onto the male body through the ‘lived space’ of the poet’s imagination and the ironic power of language.