ORGANIZATION OF THE CONCORDANCE Without electronic aids, the Concordance would be a single work, arranged with alphabetic entries and containing appendices that served as indexes of the individual works and a few other organizational ways of looking at the data. With electronic aids however, it becomes an entirely different story. There are no scribes required to painstakingly transcribe an alphabetic index into a subject index or to extract all of the information under a particular subject. Instead, all I have to do is set up different ‘sort’ criteria for the database, create an appropriate report form and hit the enter key. (Of course then I have to edit everything that results, but that task doesn’t affect the reader, so you can conveniently forget about it.) In playing with the data already accumulated and envisioning what the final product will look like, I’ve determined that the following methods of organization best suit my needs and should be sufficient for everyone else. The primary index of the concordance is Subject based (see the explanation of subject categories elsewhere), with the Subjects arranged alphabetically and the entries within each subject also listed in alphabetic order. Once at a particular entry (such as Grimes, John), all of the detailed information will be listed first in its historical order (historical in terms of the stories themselves) and then by sequential page number from within a particular work itself. I believe that this is the quickest way for someone to find what they might be looking for, since the subject will usually be readily apparent. If you are looking for a character, go to PEOPLE. If you are looking for the names of the Rim World planets, go to PLANETS. There are also two supplementary indices, one a straight alphabetic index by entry name (“Grimes, John” will be found in the ‘Gs’) which will list all of the category subjects in which that entry can be found (PEOPLE, in the case of the Grimes entry) and a Page Index, also arranged alphabetically by entry name that summarizes, in boring detail, the title of a work and the page number(s) on which the reference can be found. The major subject entries will look like the following: PEOPLE
Grimes, John “PEOPLE” denotes the subject category “Grimes, John” is the common name I have assigned to this character. In order to be able to gather all of the entries related to Grimes together, an additional field was added to the database. This field, the “sorting name” is sometimes the same as the actual entry itself. However, especially in the case of character entries, it usually is not. John Grimes is variously referred to in the works as – John, John Grimes, Grimes, Captain Grimes, Lt. Grimes, Mr. Grimes, etc. By adding the sorting name field, I was able to preserve the actual name used in the text itself, while still being able to gather together all of the references to him, regardless of what name Chandler actually used. “Captain Grimes” is, therefore, the actual wording used in the text to refer to this character in this particular entry. “A meteor pitted old bastard” is the detail for this particular entry. Where the entry appears in quotes, it is a direct quote from the work itself. Quoted text is used when I feel that it is most valuable to see the words Chandler actually wrote. The quote used here is much more effective than a statement to the effect that the character is ‘unhandsome’ or ‘apparently had acne’. “Chanc: 4” is the code for the work and page number this entry appears in. If you want to verify it for yourself or want to see greater context for the quote, go get a copy of Up To The Sky In Ships and turn to page 4. (The edition of a particular work is included in a supplementary index.) I’ve also created additional breakouts of the material for specific subjects that personally interest me. These include more detailed commentary on the Planets, Ships, Races and People subjects.
In preparing the concordance database, I had to create ‘subject categories’, broad reference subjects that would help me define an entry and also allow entries of similar kinds to be easily grouped together. There are currently 26 ‘subjects’ into which I am grouping all of the entries in the database. Although they were arbitrarily chosen by me, I believe them to cover most of the general subjects that other folks would be interested in. I initially started with 10 such categories. In alphabetical order they are: EMPIRES
Over time, I decided to expand the list to more accurately group the subjects that were coming up as I jotted my notes. The 16 new categories are: BEVERAGES
The initial indexing of the concordance is based on these categories. This actually aids tremendously in searching for material, since the object in question is usually intuitive. From there you can search alphabetically. It also allows us to view similar items from the books grouped closely together, which makes finding connections, apparent contradictions and interesting relationships that much easier to find. Of course, like everything else related to this project, the subject category list will undoubtedly change over time – most likely with the addition of a few as yet to be determined categories.
HOW THIS IS BEING PUT TOGETHER
What I am using is a good old fashioned spiral notebook (for taking story notes when I don’t feel like sitting at the computer) and an old-school version of the Paradox database program. Paradox’s primary virtues lie in my familiarity with it (I’m pretty adept at coding in its resident language) and the fact that it can output files in formats that make them readily accessible. When the time is right, everything will be transported to SQL – but that remains in the future. The process itself is pretty simple and really only varies with the length of the story. Short stories I’ll enter directly into the database – usually after a quick re-read. Novels I’ll usually take to bed with the spiral notebook and I generally don’t enter anything until I’ve completed taking notes on the book. (That way I have a complete paper record of the information as well, at least for the longer works.) Data is entered through a screen form created in Paradox that has all of the relevant fields. Certain things, like the story code, publication title are automatically entered, and several other fields (primarily the category) are backed up by lookups so that the entries always fall within a known range. Page number, the ‘category’ (arbitrary – and I hope sensible – groupings by subject) the actual item from the story and any necessary detail about it are then entered and its off to the next record. Short stories can be knocked off in an hour, while some novels will take as long as four or five hours to enter. Once a new story is completely entered, I have to go back and manually enter what I call the ‘sort name’ field for a lot of the entries (this task is partially automated). What I’m doing is rectifying a lot of the entries with common names. For example, John Grimes may be referred to in a story as ‘John’, as ‘Grimes’, as ‘John Grimes’, Lieutenant Grimes, Ensign Grimes, etc. The ‘Name’ field of the database gets the actual usage from the story, such as ‘John’. When I go back and enter the sort name information, I’ll be putting ‘Grimes, John’ in. This way, I can sort all the records by they common and indexed name, and still have the item as it was actually entered into the story. After that a small program is run that fills in the blanks, assigns record numbers and sorts the information in various ways, ending up by creating the page index report. This report provides an alphabetical listing of all the database entries, followed by the story codes and page numbers where that item can be found – an index by story and page. And that’s pretty much it, other than creating custom reports or ‘queries’ of the data (such as how many different Planets are in the database at this time?). Its an on-going process. The website reflects a fairly up-to-date picture of the progress being made and on various pages you’ll find the lists produced from the database, including which stories have already been entered and how many more there are to go. |