PEMM Update No. 2: Google Sheets as a Database

The PEMM Project uses Google Sheets as a lightweight relational database. To learn about this innovative digital humanities approach by Princeton's CDH's, read the “Is a Spreadsheet a Database?” (February 21, 2021) article by PEMM lead developer, Rebecca Sutton Koeser. There also was an abstract for a Lightening talk accepted to DH2020 .

In terms of data collection, we have four teams working on different tasks.

A small team is going through digital copies of manuscripts to type up incipits and use them to identify stories in manuscripts using Macomber's original IDs and the PEMM Incipit Tool.

We also have a team going ahead of them, just typing incipits and not IDing stories.

We have a team translating stories and another team tagging them with the correct keywords.

PEMM is open source and the data is available to everyone. So, all our data is continuously loaded to our Github site [no longer true]. At the moment, we are asking that no one use or cite the data there, as it is not complete and so could lead scholars to incorrect conclusions. We anticipate having it be usable by summer 2021.

To give a sense for the datasite, here are some images of the site.

This is a small part of the sheet about the manuscripts we are working on:

This is a small part of the sheet about the 700+ stories we are working on:

This is a small part of the sheet where we tag stories with keywords.