With tryptophan receding, I am moved to give thanks to the technical staff at the University of Alabama Digital Humanities Center and to the members of the advisory board. As I write, a mostly functional version of the project database and user interface is being tested, and prospective static content for the final site peer-reviewed, all with an eye towards a public debut in spring 2018.
Although our original plans had called for an exclusively noSQL database, experience and the rapidly growing corpus of marginal marks and annotations have required us to modify our approach. The beta site employs a hybrid of a SQL and noSQL database, one that capitalizes upon the former’s speed in filtering and querying and the latter’s flexibility and ease of updating. Thus, a simple differentiation between verbal and nonverbal forms of marginalia is married to a Json field containing a readily expandable set of categories and subcategories that both allows for more precise identification of the myriad types of marginalia found in the Mill Library, and accommodates the discovery of new forms of marginalia as the data is collected. This hybrid approach should permit such additions without requiring updating the pre-existing dataset or large-scale data migrations.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, though, we would do well to recall what Mill himself advised, in his Introduction to the System of Logic (1843): “Until we know the particulars themselves, we cannot fix upon the most correct and compact mode of circumscribing them by a general description” (CW 7.3). Which is to say, time and beta testing will provide the evidence to test this refined technical approach. Enough now to appreciate those (including the indefatigable Tyler Grace) who have gotten us this far.
–Albert D. Pionke, Project Director