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The first bibliography of secondary items on Thomas Pynchon was published in 1972, only 10 years after the publication of V. when Joseph Weixlmann listed in Critique 10 pages of items, indicating even then Pynchon's importance, prior to the publication of Gravity's Rainbow. Over the years some more were to follow, culminating in an extraordinary publication by Clifford Mead in 1989 [1]: apart from 36 pages of primary items, and an overview of Pynchon's juvenilia, he identified at the time about 90 pages of secondary items, ranging from complete monographies on Pynchon to articles in the popular press [only omitting what he calls in the Preface some trifles of negligible value [2]]. Furthermore, he gives information on about 150 dissertations of Canadian and American origin. Since the publication of this study, Mead's bibliography as a whole was not updated, though he published 2 more bibliographies, one on Vineland and another on Mason & Dixon, each about 10 pages. Three other bibliographies were published in Pynchon Notes, two of these [Sato, 1981; Osterhaus, 1999] [3] on Japanese Pynchon studies, the third one being a cumulative bibliography of the PN issues 1 to 35 (Krafft, 1995). Reception studies, one on Vineland [Keesey, 1990] and two on Mason & Dixon [Clerc, 1997; Keesey, 1995 (sic)] contain information on more than 120 new secondary items in the popular press.
Pynchon Notes started in 1979 as a simple newsletter in order to keep track of publications from, but mainly about Thomas Pynchon -before growing rapidly into a well-respected academical periodical. Every issue contains a bibliographical section (primary and secondary). Contributors, first from the US and Canada, and later on from around the world -reflecting the internationalisation of Pynchon studies- keep on sending in bibliographical information, ranging from the minutest tidbits on Pynchon in the popular press, over multimedia to bibliographical information about scholarly articles, sometimes accompanied with a short quote or description. One of its editors and copyright owners, John M. Krafft keeps all this information in one document. In the Summer of 2006 this document counted 266 pages. Excluding the information on 386 dissertations and the primary bibliographical information [212 items, including 39 support notices by Pynchon], it is still 169 pages long and has over 3,000 secondary items listed. A rough estimate is that the information on Pynchon and his works has more than tripled since 1989.
The rise of the internet, very early adopted both by everyday readers of Pynchon's work and scholars alike [the pynchon-l discussion list archives go back to 1991!], gave birth to numerous Pynchon pages and sites, often containing suggestions for further reading, including a rather impressive overview of Pynchon in German [Sell, s.d.]. Throughout the '90s we saw also the emerging of electronic [versions of printed] journals, Postmodern Culture being the first scholarly one that was exclusively available online, and many institutions made the data, or rather the information on their data, in their archives more or less public.
This was the situation before 21 November 2006, when Against the Day was published. Within 2 months of its publication one could identify about 75 articles in print and online, and the first conference on this novel was already organised 7 months after its publication. Furthermore, a PynchonWiki was released, a joint effort initiated by Tim Ware to start annotations, first on Against the Day, and later on the other works by Pynchon.
To find one's way in such an amount of information is difficult, not only because it is stored in several places and across different media, but the more information on a topic is available, the harder to qualify. This implies that those interested in secondary information on Pynchon and his works have more and more difficulties in identifying quickly an item. Hence this database application, an attempt to locate in one place all relevant [and sometimes irrelevant] secondary information on Pynchon and his publications. It seeks to integrate the currently available information in print and online and tries to design the underlying database in such a way that items are qualified in several ways: subject, language, genre and subgenre, location, availability etc. Another goal is to reconstruct the history of items: a conference paper, to take a simple example, can be printed, revised, expanded, reprinted, excerpted and/or translated. Furthermore, about 15% of all criticism are reviews of studies. It might be interesting to list items in such a way that the user can not only check the information he or she is looking for, but that the application renders also an overview of the critical reception a study receives. Information has to be visualised with a few mouse clicks [computer program efficiency is often measured in clicks] and without the use of search engines. Finally, the information will be stored in a combination of Acrobat files: one can check out a draft of a .PDF contaning information on dissertations.
As a relational database is basically a set of tables that correlate [a table being a simple list of rows], the same information is used over and over again: when creating a database record, just insert once, and use it manifold by simple reference. This implies that adding new records can be done fast [and cheap]. When querying a database, combining data stored in different tables make a limitless way of sorting and presenting data possible. A relational database 'decides' on the relevance of a query, based on how the relations between the different tables are defined. While this may sound simple and easy, the logical description of a relational database system was only developed as late as 1969 by IBM. At the time, This Firm was not interested in developing this model further into database programs. Only at the end of the '70s a small start up company, later called Oracle, released the first commercial relational database system - the very same year Pynchon Notes kicked off.
The development of computer technology since the '60s allowed libraries to catalogue their collections in a structured way. However, since the relational database model was not yet developed, the method in which bibliographical information was stored reflected what one can call the hard copy way of filing data: as if a computer were only a simple drawer, a 1-and-0 Rolodex. To this day, this model can be seen in the huge online catalogues: one row containing all relevant information. Imagine an enormous spreadsheet with millions of rows, and how a user without a thorough knowledge of the way the spreadsheet 'works', tries to retrieve relevant information. While this way of storing information was a huge leap forward compared to a typed card, it has 6 disadvantages: [1] information is redundant, [2] finding the relevant information becomes difficult, [3] developing querying methods becomes complicated, [4] it requires the development of search engines, [5] making mistakes is way too easy and finally, [6] this is a very expensive process.
Apart from these disadvantages there's another major issue: from the very beginning of computer cataloguing, there was no distinction between form and content, which lead to discussions on how to present data. This required the development of computer programs of which the only goal is to handle the presentation of a bibliographical item. However, a relational database application tries to make a complete distinction between what is stored and how the information is manipulated.
In order to overcome the disadvantages described above, a relational database application consists of 2 main components: the database itself and an interface that controls the data manipulation. The choice of the 2 components is usually based on system and safety requirements, available budget, number of potential users etc. On the lower end of the database server/client market, there are 2 products that can be used for free: the former Swedish and far-from-perfect mySQL engine, now owned by SUN, which does not cost anything at all when used for non-commercial purposes, and an open source rendering language for creating a web interface, PHP, a programming language that has finally outgrown its initial flaws.
Designing a database is governed by a set of rules called 'normalization', rules meant to create tables and relations between the tables as simple and elegant as possible. Let us take a look at this item:
Berressem, Hanjo. "'Vineland': Everything Under Control" in: Pynchon's Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois, United States [1993]: 201-242.
The simplest relationships are on location/geographical level - it goes without saying that the monography is linked to the publisher:
| Field Value | University of Illinois Press | Urbana | Illinois | United States |
| Table | Publishers | Locations | States | Countries |
| has Foreign Key | id_location IS IN | id_state IS IN | id_country IS IN | |
| has Primary Key | 5 -> | 8 -> | 12 -> | US |
| [for safety reasons field values and names do not correspond with the actual ones] | ||||
This process is repeated on several levels:
The complete model can be better described elsewhere. A graphic overview is here.
Formatting an item is carried out on the server and governed by the query programming. This makes it easy to change the format of it, when needed.
For a detailed overview of the current application status and a query description: this is all on a different page.
[1] Clifford Mead. Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography Dalkey Archive, Normal, Ill. (1989): vii. Out of print.
[3] Osterhaus' bibliography is in fact a translation into English of items in Japanese. He also lists two additional bibliographies, one on Gravity's Rainbow, the other one on V. which are both for apparent reasons unusable for our purpose.
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