Category Archives: databases

Using Databases in Scholarly Articles

databases, HIST696, practicum

While looking through the last three years of the journal Enterprise & Society, it is obvious that more historians have incorporated electronic databases into their research within the last year than in previous years, but I am not sure why. Maybe the editors have relaxed their restrictions on databases (if there ever were any), or the author’s have been more transparent about what sources they are using. Or maybe there just are more databases being used in these later articles. The journal’s standard bibliography of works cited is parsed out by the various types of sources used, and while some articles include databases in the “primary sources” category, there is no specific heading for electronic resources.

In Sept 2013’s issue, Matthew David Mitchell searches Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database in his article, “‘Legitimate Commerce’ in the Eighteenth Century: The Royal African Company of England Under the Duke of Chandos, 1720–1726.” By searching the database with the parameters of 1698 – 1807, Matthew was able to quantify the number of slaves brought by independent British slave traders to the Americas, in addition to those brought by the Royal African Company. I actually had not heard of this database before, so its inclusion in the references was informative in itself.

This month, in Sept 2014’s issue, Paula Cruz-Fernández takes her research in another direction in her article,  “Marketing the Hearth: Ornamental Embroidery and the Building of the Multinational Singer Sewing Machine Company.” While the author cites many historical periodicals, such as Godey’s Lady Book and Harper’s Bazaar, she also is clear about how she accessed these sources. Cruz-Fernández provides documentation in her footnotes, as well as in her works cited, that she used Cornell University’s Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History archive, also known as HEARTH. By providing readers with this information, the author makes her methodology somewhat more known and transparent. It also allows the reader to learn of such an online database that may not have been previously known.

There are only four more articles that explicitly reference online databases as sources in Enterprise & Society and all are from 2014. It seems like historians are becoming more comfortable with citing databases when accessing historical periodicals and data, which is something that we as historians should be doing more often anyway. By being more transparent with our research, we can help each other learn of new sources and online archives that can only benefit the breadth and quality of all of our research.

Thinking about Searching Databases

databases, digital history, digitization, HIST696, OCR, readings

This week’s readings all explored how wonderful it is that so many historical documents have been scanned, digitized, run through OCR software and made available through countless different online databases, making lengthy trips to libraries and archives less common. Of course, there are drawbacks to relying on database searching, as the authors have pointed out.

Different databases behave differently when users type in a keyword or search phrase. As Patrick Spedding points out in “The New Machine,” some databases will run OCR for transcription purposes, to be used in the search process, but will not make that original OCR text file available to users. In Spedding’s example of the Eighteenth Century Collections Online database, this lack of transcription is supplanted by using “coded linkage” by highlighting the keyword in the original document. Other issues arise when alternate spellings and synonyms come into play as well. How can you be sure that you are finding all of the documents related to your search when using these handy databases? You can’t.

This reminds me of Lara Putnam’s example of the Benbow Follies in her working paper from this year. While researching using microfilm, she came across and editorial that referenced “Benbow’s Follies” and three years later decided to do some more digging on that serendipitous find. Turning to Google Books, she found more information, but still wanted know how Benbow appeared in her original research in Costa Rica. By searching digitized newspaper sources, she found advertisements for Caribbean Tours by Benbow’s musical troupes, which she had never found in the traditional sources such as music reference sources.

These examples help illustrate the good and the bad of searching databases. On one hand, you might not be able to find what you want, either because you don’t know what you don’t know or because of wonky searching capabilities. But on the other hand, the ability to search such a multitude of documents from the comfort of your home can aid in tackling a research question that previously may not have been answered if one hasn’t had the opportunity to travel to libraries and archives across the world. Either way, this “digital turn” is still evolving, and hopefully the future has in store for us researchers more comprehensive and creative searching abilities.