Abstracts Category : Other

Respect the gap: from big to boutique data through "Laboring-Class Poets Online"

by Cole Crawford

This thesis consists of two major components. The first is Laboring-Class Poets Online (LCPO), a database-driven website that provides information about the more than 2,000 British laboring-class poets who published between 1700 and 1900 and their writing, lives, and literary relationships. I developed LCPO to demonstrate the importance of laboring-class writing to social and literary history by enhancing access to the underlying dataset, which numerous scholars have contributed to over the past thirty years. LCPO transforms this unstructured document into a relational database and provides new interfaces for users to query, visualize, and explore this rich source of biographical and bibliographic information. In the second written section, I argue that current big data understandings and implementations of databases fail to adequately meet the needs of many humanities scholars. I introduce the concept of boutique data as an alternative framework that respects the ambiguous gaps in humanities datasets. Using LCPO as an example of a boutique data project, I contend that a boutique approach to data better accommodates complex understandings of space and time as continuously unfolding events.Advisors/Committee Members: Ward, Megan (advisor), Gottlieb, Evan (committee member).