Interesting database thingy (1 Viewer)

mjp

Founding member
I am working on the new database (please hold down your mocking laughter) and just added a function to differentiate collected from uncollected works. Interestingly, the result shows that about 25% of the known works (excluding new finds by Abel) are uncollected.

You know, just in case anyone was wondering if there is enough out there for future books.
 
Strange.
I swear to goD.
I was thinking to myself the other day: "I sure wish the database had a function that could select poems that had appeared only once. You know like the poem "a need for glue".
Well, well. I guess that goes to show that everything is connected after all...
Looking forward to the new Dbase.
 
I think about the database all the time, and it's (only) one of the nagging things that haunt me. It will rise one day!
 
25% seems about right... but I've recently found out that quite a few apparently uncollected poems have been published under a different title. Same goes for the poems I thought to be unpublished. Checking the first line is usually not enough to establish whether a poem is uncollected/unpublished or not. This is hard work, man. We definitely should get paid in this life :D
 
I might be able to present another option...like "may appear under another title."

Do a loose match (simple, not advanced) for love to see what I mean:

[oops - don't want to expose this to everybody just yet]

In any event, "uncollected" and "may appear under another title" are the only two flags I can see being of any interest to the casual searcher.
 
Yeah, me too, but there are MANY dupes out there with different titles. Strangely enough, there seems to be more unpublished poems from the early to mid 60s than from any other period. For some reason, Martin hardly ever used them when putting out the posthumous collections. He basically used the best ones -to him- in Roominghouse, and the others remain unpublished. I would say that a Roominghouse Madrigals Revisited collection of new poems is indeed possible.
 
mjp: if it's any comfort, I dream about databases myself.

So are you going to have a link to the alternate titles for "may appear under another title" poems? I haven't see what you've done yet, if it's live ...
 
Yeah, eventually and ideally it will have a link to what it believes may be the same (or at least similar) poem under a different name. That's a problematic area though, because I hosed that chunk of the data. It can be rebuilt, but it won't all be there when db2 opens for business.

As for seeing it, it's there if you know where to look (I mentioned it elsewhere a long time ago), but big chunks of it are not functional yet, so there's not much to see.
 

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