The Annals of English Literature 1475--1950 provide an elegant, yet brief, overview of not only the major works of English literature, but also the intellectual milieu from which they emerged. Inspired by a fantasy of Sir Walter Raleigh, the chronological compilation aims:
to give the student, at a glance, the main literary output of any
year or series of years; to show what books people were likely to
be reading at any time, and with what rivals a candidate for
literary fame had to reckon. Though the main object is to
discover any book in its chronological setting, and so to serve
the ends of a work of reference, it has been found in practice
that these brief annals can be read continuously with profit,
and even with pleasure." (v)
Along with books, the Annals include events and intellectual accomplishments that interest the literary student. Being "read continuously with profit" understates the value of reading this work which can uncover themes, motifs and--even--zeitgeists in the production of English literature.
This project to produce Annals for the University of Virginia Libraries builds on the observation that a well-ordered chronology provides the primary evidence of the collective thought of an organization. Decisions are made in the day-to-day activities of libraries that aim at greater truths and higher goods; charting these decisions illuminates the human thinking that went into them and the problems that they might have had to solve.
Refusing premature optimization, the project began with a sketch of a final form based on the Annals and also Neville Williams Chronology of the Expanding World: 1492 to 1762:
Based on this sketch, I began an org-mode text-file of the major events, tagging items without pattern and doing minimal secondary research to find exact dates. In time, I will convert this to a more optimized form, but want to proceed in this loose fashion to see what patterns emerge first. For progress, see annalsNotes.org which uses the org-ref module to link to a bibliography of sources.
After identifying the six areas that I would be recording, I prepared an Emacs forms-mode interface for entering just those items into a dsv file. I've picked the dsv (with a tab separator) so that I can easily sort the entries as I develop them, but also because it should be easy to write a script to convert the entries into some sort of presentation format. I've switched to MLA style citations for the sources, still listed in the bib. The makefile uses csvfix to convert this dsv file into standard csv which GitHub knows how to display, but which should also have greater usefulness in adhering to RFC4180 and--later--to W3C standards for CSV on the web.
See issues