Assorted items for a Monday evening

First off, a link to the Sunday Telegraph article on the new Gale database, British Literary Manuscripts: Oscar Wilde love letters among thousands of literary originals in new collection.

Here's how they describe the collection:


The handwritten, intimate correspondence is among 600,000 pages of manuscripts and original documentation in a new online resource called British Literary Manuscripts Online c1660-1900.

The collection is the first of its kind and could revolutionise the study of English literature.

Until now, the material, which includes letters, diaries, sketches and early drafts of works by such literary greats as Charles Dickens, William Blake, the Brontës, Robbie Burns, Walter Scott and Wilde, has been scattered across the globe in different libraries and has been impossible to source in a single place.


I know there's often this murky question out there among my family and friends about what it is exactly that I do at my job. In this case, I went through a lot of the preliminary content about three years ago and came up with a strategy and plan for how we could use controlled author and work names on this 600,000+ pages of handwritten manuscripts, so that people using the database can search easily and consistently for specific items or groups of related items. I won't go into the details, but it was pretty complicated, since we didn't have the manuscripts themselves yet and had to work off a series of "finding aids" that the British Library had assembled over the last fifty years or so and our budget was limited.

Um, and then I asked for status updates as other people did the genuine work. (Call that the "management" part of my gig.) That's pretty much what the "Manager of Indexing and Metadata Tagging" does. I figure out clever, practical, and affordable ways to search accurately across vast piles of data. Then I ask somebody else to do the real work.

The real point here is that I worked on something that yesterday's Sunday Telegraph claims "could revolutionise the study of English literature" and even if you spell "revolutionise" in the silly British way, that's still pretty cool. (And I'm sure it would be a huge shock to any number of my former English Lit professors to know that I was involved in creating such a thing.)

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Item #2 is a very interesting article from The Atlantic on the "Grant Study", a long-term study that followed several hundred Harvard students from the 1940s over nearly 70 years, and which had as one of its goals determining why it is that some people succeed in life, while others do not: What Makes Us Happy?

Here's one of its most interesting points:


In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, (Dr. George) Vaillant (the study's director for the last 42 years) was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”


I won't go into the article in depth here, but it's a fabulous read for many reasons. Not least of which is that it leads you to reflect on the course of your own life.

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The last item that I have to pass along results from a silly little Facebook quiz. Those of you who have been on Facebook know that these things are all over the place. About every two weeks or so one catches my eye. In this case, I'm sure it comes as no surprise that I found this quiz irresistable: What Godzilla character are you?

The results? According to the quiz -- which I'm sure carries every bit as much scientific validity as that 70-year Harvard study run by assorted doctors, sociologists, and psychiatrists:


John took the What Godzilla character are you? quiz and the result is You are Godzilla!

Nobody else can dominate your domain. You are brash, yet loyal. You can be protective as well as destructive in your social endevors. In the end, you are the master over all that you put your mind to.


Well sure, that makes sense. It does, however, leave us with one question. Why is it that my beagle is the one with the radioactive fire breath?