Name: Poggenburg
Owner: Heard Library
Description: A curated dataset of the chronology of Baudelaire's life
Created: 2016-11-09 17:58:03.0
Updated: 2017-11-03 14:28:20.0
Pushed: 2017-12-21 03:31:03.0
Homepage: http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/baud-search.pl
Size: 19506
Language: null
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In 1987, Raymond Poggenburg (1926-2004), a professor of French literature at Vanderbilt University, published the first edition of Charles Baudelaire: Une Micro-histoire with Jose Corti and the Vanderbilt University Presses. The aim of the project was to provide a detailed chronology of the life of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), the esteemed French poet and essayist.
The first edition of the Micro-histoire is divided into four parts: the chronology, references, bibliography, and chronological index. The chronology, comprised of dated entries, constitutes the majority of the tome. It begins with the birth of Baudelaire's paternal grandfather, Claude Baudelaire, in 1711 and ends shortly after Baudelaire's death in 1867. Subsequently, the references are presented much like an endnote section, with up to 10 citations for each entry. The bibliography is an additional resource unto itself, encompassing primary source documents and critical studies up to the date of publication. Finally, the chronological index allows readers to look up individuals, places, or other relevant entities and find the chronology entries in which they are referenced.
It should be noted that Poggenburg distinguished his Micro-histoire from a traditional biography of Baudelaire in a number of ways. While acknowledging that absolute objectivity was unattainable, Poggenburg insisted that the Micro-histoire “ne s'offre pas comme exprimant le point de vue personnel de son auteur” (1987, 1). To emphasize the 'factual' nature of the work, Poggenburg did not write his Micro-histoire as a single narrative but, rather, crafted 4,155 entries and organized them chronologically in order to document specific occurrences related to the life and work of Baudelaire. Furthermore, Poggenburg substantiated nearly every entry with at least one reference, drawn from a rich bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Even when the date of an event was derived from other information or research, Poggenburg identified the resources by which he extrapolated the information. The success of Poggenburg's effort to provide minimal supposition about the events he documented is reflected in the criticism leveled against the Micro-histoire: namely, that the title “Chronologie” would have sufficed, since there is no unifying narrative to earn the volume the title “Histoire” (Zeigler 1989, 310).
In the early 2000s, a second, e-edition of the Micro-histoire was published jointly by the Vanderbilt University Press and Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries. The number of entries was expanded to 4,519, and the bibliography was extended to 475 items. The switch from a physical to digital medium for the Micro-histoire was radical in many ways, but it aligned fundamentally with one of Poggenburg's key wishes for the work. By enabling more frequent updates and additions to the chronology and the bibliography, the new digital platform offered a means to make the Micro-histoire “une sorte de chantier, un projet en développement, et non…un monument seulement” (1987, 1).
While Poggenburg's vision to have researchers regularly correct and augment the Micro-histoire has yet to come to fruition, the online publication of the volume has greatly facilitated its use by students, researchers, and the interested public. The increased accessibility of the e-edition is due, in large part, to how the materials were digitized. Rather than preserve the layout of the first edition in an e-book format or scan and OCR a copy of the physical volume, it was decided that the contents of the Micro-histoire would be loaded into a SQL database. Using a web portal built on the perl framework, the database could be queried by users from around the world, either with a keyword or date range.
There are, of course, a number of issues which arise in the translation of the Micro-histoire from analogue to digital formats. One particularly intractable problem is the recording of dates. Though many of Poggenburg's entries have specific dates attached to them, the formatting is inconsistent and many are not absolute. Some entries, for example, date to “Spring” or “between October and November” of a specific year, whereas others may extend across multiple years. Even when the date is in the 'standard' first edition format of day (one- or two-digit arabic numeral), month (capital roman numeral), and year (two- or four-digit arabic numeral) separated by a space, a one- or two-letter abbreviation indicating the day of the week may be inserted between the month and year. The date issue was partially resolved in the e-edition by translating all dates into a mm/dd/yyyy format, and additional modifications (discussed below) have been made in order to optimize discovery of relevant information for date-based queries.
The structure of the first edition presents another problem for the production of an e-edition of the Micro-histoire. As outlined in the preceding section, the original Micro-histoire had four distinct parts: chronology, references, bibliography, and chronological index. By appending the references to the appropriate entry for the chronology and replacing the chronological index with a keyword search, the e-edition preserves much of the functionality of the original Micro-histoire. The bibliographical database, however, remains hidden to the end-user of the second edition.
It may be argued that the Micro-histoire bibliography has been supplanted by other bibliographical resources. Indeed, between 1965 and 2005, the W.T. Bandy Center for French and Modern Studies at the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries published an annual review of publications related to Baudelaire in the Bulletin Baudelairien. Additionally, between 2006 and 2012, the Bandy Center published a separate Baudelairian Recensement Bibliographique online. Nevertheless, not every publication on Baudelaire contains information relevant to the Micro-histoire, and the inability to programmatically access Poggenburg's bibliography hinders continued development of the dataset by not permitting scholars to easily identify whether a resource has been reviewed for information or not.
In August 2016, due (in part) to the deterioration of the perl framework on which the e-edition was built, the Micro-histoire data preservation project was initiated. First, the e-edition entry and bibliography databases were flattened and exported to CSV files. Subsequently, OpenRefine and an assortment of customized VBA macros were used to clean and standardize the data. In addition to basic data cleaning such as proofreading, the removal of duplicate entries, and the standardization of names and references, some of the substantive changes to the data were as follows:
After consideration of the Dublin Core and CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model schemata, the Library of Congress Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) version 3.6 was selected for structuring and marking up the Micro-histoire data and metadata in XML. Some of the applicable benefits of MODS for the project include:
Despite the appropriateness of MODS to the data and metadata of the Micro-histoire, several adaptations were made in order to fully and acurately describe the records. An explication of the instantiation of MODS 3.6 used in the Micro-histoire XML files follows in the form of an annotated sample record and a brief reference guide.
Following is a sample entry from the Micro-histoire, as it appears in the present github repository, with a description of its basic structure and syntax.
l version= "1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
s xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3" version="3.6" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-6.xsd">
The header for every record is the same. It identifies the version of XML, character encoding, and version of MODS utilized.
<identifier displayLabel = "record number" type = "local">
6115
</identifier>
The identifier is a unique number assigned to each entry of the Micro-histoire. It was generated when the entries were loaded into the database for the e-edition.
<originInfo>
<dateCaptured>
08/16/1999
</dateCaptured>
<dateModified>
03/08/2002
</dateModified>
</originInfo>
The originInfo for the Poggenburg entries includes the dateCaptured (formatted as MM/DD/YYYY, the date on which the digital entry was first created) and the dateModified (formatted as MM/DD/YYYY, the date on which the entry was last modified for the e-edition).
<subject>
<temporal point = "start">
04/09/1821
</temporal>
<temporal point = "end">
04/09/1821
</temporal>
</subject>
The subject field corresponds to Library of Congress subject headings. Its contents, as indicated by the 'temporal' subelements, define the date(s) for which Poggenburg recorded the events of the Micro-histoire entry. To more accurately reflect the different types of dates and date ranges Poggenburg used, start and end points were incorporated (formatted as MM/DD/YYYY). In the case of this entry, since the exact date of the event is known, both the start and end dates are the same.
<note type = "poggenburg date">
9 IV 21
</note>
In order to preserve the first and second edition entry headings, note type = "poggenburg date" has been used to record the contents of Poggenburg's dates.
<note type = "journal content">
Naissance de Charles Baudelaire au 13, rue Hautefeuille {1}.
</note>
note type = "journal content" records the contents of Poggenburg's entry in the Micro-histoire.
<relatedItem type = "references">
As has been stated above, the content of each of the Micro-histoire entries is substantiated by at least one reference. The bibliographical information about each reference is included in its own relatedItem type = "references" element.
<identifier displayLabel = "bibliographic abbreviation" type = "local">
P-Z
</indentifier>
The identifier within each relatedItem is a unique bibliographical abbreviation derived from the e-edition bibliographical database.
<titleInfo>
<title>
Baudelaire
</title>
</titleInfo>
As prescribed by MODS 3.6, the title of each reference item is placed inside the titleInfo container.
<name type = "personal">
<namePart>
Pichois, Claude
</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm type = "text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type = "personal">
<namePart>
Ziegler, Jean
</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm type = "text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
Authors and editors (up to three each) are listed after the titleInfo, with their exact role in creating the work defined in the roleTerm field.
<originInfo>
<place>
<placeTerm type = "text">Paris</placeTerm>
</place>
<publisher>
Julliard
</publisher>
<dateIssued>
1987
</dateIssued>
<dateCaptured>
03/07/2002
</dateCaptured>
<dateModified>
03/07/2002
</dateModified>
</originInfo>
The originInfo subelement of relatedItem describes two types of data: the publication information of the work (place, publisher, and dateIssued formatted as YYYY) and the dates (formatted as MM/DD/YYYY) when the citation was first added to (dateCaptured) or updated in (dateModified) the e-edition.
<part>
<extent unit = "pages">
<start>
51
</start>
<end>
51
</end>
</extent>
</part>
The part subelement is applied in the Micro-histoire in order to record the specific pages of the work which Poggenburg cited. In order to accommodate multi-page citations, the extent of the part cited includes both a start and an end page number. If only one page is cited, the start and end numbers will be the same, as here.
<genre>
Book
</genre>
For the e-edition of the Micro-histoire, the genre (book, article, catalog, etc.) of every work cited was recorded. In order to remain compliant with MODS standards, the genre is recorded and appropriate standards followed for each type of work.
</relatedItem>
As noted above, if there is more than one work cited in the Micro-histoire entry, each citation will appear in its own relatedItem container.
ds>
Each record ends with a closing mods tag.
The file names have been constructed by linking two data points with an underscore (): the identifier assigned to the record in the e-edition of the Micro-histoire_ and the start date of the Poggenburg entry, formatted as YYYY-MM-DD. The inclusion of the e-edition identifier, though arbitrarily assigned, is to ensure that each record has a unique filename. The file name for the example annotated above, therefore, is 6115_1821-04-09.xml.
While users of the Micro-histoire XML files in the present repository are directed to the MODS 3.6 Outline of Elements and Attributes page for a full, human-readable description of the schema, a brief guide to relevant elements and attributes is provided here for reference. The list is organized alphabetically by top-level element, and the following format is used:
[general description, if applicable]
* As seen in the annotated record above, relatedItem has been used to link bibliographical information to each of Poggenburg's Micro-histoire entries. As is noted in the documentation for MODS 3.6, the top-level element relatedItem may accept any of the other top-level elements as a subelement. In lieu of creating an expansive and recursive list of subelements in the description of how the relatedItem element has been applied to the Micro-histoire, an asterisk (*) will be added to any elements, attributes, subelements, or data types used exclusively within the relatedItem container, while a carat (^) will be appended to indicate use within Micro-histoire chronology entries. No notation will indicate common usage between the chronology entry and relateItem container.
genre* (string)In accordance with the MARC Genre Term List, a MODS-compliant controlled vocabulary, the genre of the work cited.
identifier (integer^ or string*)A unique identifier of the Micro-histoire chronology or bibliography entry, based on the e-edition.
name*The name container includes information about the author or editor of the work cited.
note (string)Notes are used to contain non-bibliographical information which cannot be standardized. The content of the Micro-histoire entries, the Poggenburg-formatted entry dates, and comments intended for current and future curators of the dataset (as included in the e-edition) are recorded within different notes.
originInfoThe subelements are used to describe when the entry was added to (dateCaptured), or modified in (dateModified), the e-edition databases. originInfo also includes publication information for works cited, including place of publication, year of publication, and publisher.
part*The part element is used in the relatedItem bibliographical information for two purposes. The first is to provide additional publication information for works which are part of series, such as the enumerations of journals and newspapers. This includes use of the extent sub-element to designate the page numbers for articles and chapters of larger works (nested under the related Item type = "host" element). The second use is to define the specific pages cited by Poggenburg in each entry, which is denoted by the extent subelement of the `related Item type = “references” element.
relatedItem*As indicated above, relatedItem is the only top-level element in MODS which may take every other top-level element (including itself) as a subelement. The user of the Micro-histoire XML files is directed to the extended documentation for the schema, specifically the section on relatedItem, for further explication of its use in constructing bibliographical references.
subject^Corresponding to Library of Congress subject headings, this element is used to define the date(s) on which the Micro-histoire events occurred.
titleInfo*The container element for the title of works cited in the Micro-histoire.
We encourage you to download the Micro-histoire dataset (available as a zip file in this repository) and experiment with it. Perhaps you are curious about Baudelaire's translations of Poe? See if you can write a query to find all mentions of Edgar Allan Poe and follow where the results take you. (You may be surprised to find that a very basic query will bring up a number of bibliographical references, too.) Are you interested in Baudelaire-related events during a specific period of the 19th century? Then write a query to gather all of the entries from a specific year or date range and determine how you would like to organize and search the information returned. Does the Micro-histoire bibliography interest you as a starting point for your own research? Write a query to return all unique works cited.
If you encounter any issues with the Micro-histoire dataset as you play with and ply it for information, please submit an issue with details to help us improve the dataset for the future.
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)