As part of my doctoral work I have needed to create a
database.
This did not go well.
I suspect part of the problem is that I am not a terribly
logically minded individual, and after attending a two-day course aimed at
students from all backgrounds run by my university and a week of staring at a
computer screen I had made little tangible progress.
So, like any good procrastinator, I decided to leave it and
pick it up when I felt like I had more time.
…fast forward 3 years…
What I thought I would do today was share was the gems of
three years of avoiding not being able to write a database.
1. Don’t use MS Word.
If
I had used MS Excel my life would have been a lot easier. I didn’t completely
abandon the project, I did gather the data for the database, but if I’d
gathered it in Excel I would have saved myself a lot of time later when I
actually had a database to work with.
2. A ) Go find someone who has worked with
databases.
B ) If they’re a historian, doubly go find
them
This is the more important of my two lessons. I was slightly
in denial about actually having to create a database and hoped that my Word doc.
would see me through (feel free to chuckle derisively at this point). I had the
good fortune to be put in contact however with a fellow researcher who had
spent 4 years working with a database who very kindly took pity on me and
knocked me one together.
3. Find a course aimed at historians, not a general one.
Not everyone database-challenged may have the luck I had however,
and my helper/saviour/colleague recommended this course run by the IHR:
The course I attended was excellent, but I struggled to
convert what I’d been taught into something I could use with my historical
data. A simple google quickly brings up the IHR course, along with many others.
They’re not hard to find, but if you don’t look for them –
you don’t know they’re there!
Free
handbook on designing historical databases:
How to,
historical database tutorial:
Notes
A big thank
you to Sam Gibbs who put me right on databases:
No comments:
Post a Comment