Data Entry

I've spent two days re-entering data on my network of 25 poets, resulting in about 110 nodes and nearly 2,000 edges. The reason for this data-entry push has been to gain some granular clarity regarding time, so that now each submission to a poetry magazine is coded as an edge in the network. This allows me to insert things like title, year of publication, etc. as attributes of the edges, and will also allow me to create a more temporally dynamic view of poetic networks across the years 1920 to 1944. Time consuming as it is to input this information (and I've only done the bare minimum thus far, leaving out the Japanese titles, the volume and page numbers), I think it will ultimately be much more meaningful to have a year by year snapshot of the poetic field. And it is still possible to load this edgelist into a program like UCINET and have it convert the duplicate edges (i.e., a contribution made to the same journal) into weighted edges upon which I can then run some statistical analyses. 

Next week's goal will be to expand the project by inputting information for a second group of poets who are predominantly known for their affiliation with the avant-garde journal "Shi to shiron" (『詩と詩論』), which ran from 1928 to 1933, and thus overlaps with the period in which "Gakko" was being published. The goal here will be to see how closely or loosely connected are these two sets of poets, who are traditionally separated by ideological and aesthetic orientation. To what extent do the poets who contributed to these two journals participate in the same magazines over the course of the 24 year period that concerns us? Do we see clear groupings that would confirm our historical sense of their affinities (or lack of affinity) with one another? Do they converge or diverge at different points in time? Do the poets participating in each journal exhibit different network typologies? My hope is that by looking at these two groups in particular, I might be able to show the ultimate benefit of inputting the modernist poetry database in its entirety.