Data Conversion Notes

Overview

Extracting the information from Michael Turner's original Access database was a case of digital archaeology: scraping away layers of revised or redundant data, identifying and clearing experiments that didn't work, rejecting partially completed or eventually ignored tables, and incrementally building a script to pull out the gold coins and silver treasures for presentation in this wiki.

This description of the process of identifying and extracting the information from the database is not meant to disparage the years of effort that Michael Turner and the rest of the team spent on this project. It is a herculean effort that resulted in 30,906 individuals being described in painstaking detail across hundreds of years of book making history in London.

The original database

The MS Access database retrieved from Michael Turner's laptop had 50 tables in it.

Specific Issues

Occupations

The occupations table originally had 699 different occupations across the 18,736 individuals with an occupation. Some of the multiplicity resulted from typos: Bookeller, Bookeseller, Bookselller, Bokseller, Booskeller, Booksellser, Bookkseller, Bokkseller, Bookiseller, etc. Some others were different ways of describing the same occupation: Paper Maker vs Paper Manufacturer. We decided to correct the obvious typos and otherwise preserve the occupations as originally listed for each member of the database. Additionally, we created a shorter list of 65 occupations into which we could group the detailed occupations; these we used to create wiki Categories.

For example, the Category "Performing Arts" collects together anybody with the original occupation of Actor, Actress, Composer, Dramatist, Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, Musician, Opera manager, Organist, or Playwright.

See the complete list of occupations and Categories for details.