Entity Pages
As noted, a digital project allows us to highlight entities that thread through Twain's life. Holmes brilliantly showed how one entity (Place) could be used to augment and enrich our understanding of Twain's day-by-day life through his travels and moves.
One of the primary challenges of this project is to push this further and bring to the fore other key entities in Twain's life. We should note that librarians and archivists use the term entity because they adopted the E-R data-modeling tradition, and entity is exactly the neutral, type-agnostic word that the model uses for "a distinct thing we want to describe and relate to other things." It lets a person, a place, a corporation, and a publication all be handled by the same descriptive machinery — identifiable, named, attributed, and linked — without privileging one kind of thing over another.
For this project, in addition to Places, we will be working with key People,Corporate Bodies, and Publications. One of the primary tasks we will have will be to decide which and what entities to use. See individual entity pages below for more information.
Important Notes as we work through the entities:
- A digital project, in one sense, renders pulling out and noting entities redundant. After all, a user can search to find any person, place, corporate body, or publication as each appears throughout the day-by-day entries.
- As we know, Twain had an incredibly rich life that bridged rough living and fame, the literary life and the business life, the Mississippi River and the courts of Europe, a Hannibal boyhood of little formal schooling and an honorary Oxford degree, a dozen occupations (printer, pilot, prospector, journalist, lecturer, novelist, publisher, and speculator) and a single unmistakable persona that outlasted them all; thus, for many, even the seasoned scholar, knowing all the key entities in his life can be difficult, particularly knowing how they link in time and space and publishing history. Having lists to review can be helpful for students and researchers.
- The problem with Fears, as we have noted, is the sheer volume. Tens of thousands of people, places, corporate bodies, and publications are mentioned. Some are fleeting, and others are critically important.
- . In the end, the good thing about a digital project is that it can grow. Over time, we may find that particular people, places, and corporate bodies are important and need to be added to a list (and perhaps mistakes were made with spelling, locations, and dates). In short, we do not need to let perfection get in the way of the good.
