8. Building a book history database

This chapter recounts my lived experience as a novice Digital Humanist. It is deliberately anecdotal, rather than theoretical, in style and form. The chapter tells the story of how I commenced a doctorate in the field of book history, then, with minimal technical training, came to build a large relational database that both enabled and complemented my written dissertation as well as providing value for future users. My research is centred on Angus & Robertson, the largest 20th-century Australian bookseller and publishing house. I was particularly interested in Angus & Robertson’s use of book reviews as a promotional tool. The company archive contains millions of miscellaneous documents and, even when limited to certain subsets, there were thousands of undigitised pages to interrogate. In response to that scale, I turned to the Digital Humanities, using the Heurist platform to design a bespoke database schema then populate the requisite fields with metadata from the physical documents, and subsequently enriching the records with secondary research. The resultant Angus & Robertson Book Reviews Database, which has been published online, remains a living database that at the time of writing contains 152,000 records, each with several fields, amounting to over a million data points.In this chapter, I explain design decisions as well as obstacles that I encountered whilst building the database without prior technical skills. I also share how the database has allowed me to tell previously untold stories about Angus & Robertson, book reviewing, and the 20th-century Australian print industry. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ongoing potential of this specific database and how platforms like Heurist extend important opportunities to novice Digital Humanists.