Normality: For or Against?
I’m a historian who is currently designing and/or building four databases. As I work through the complexities of each project, I’m struck by two thoughts.
First: I’m overworked.
Second: I like the way relational algebra makes me think.
Good database design involves breaking a data set into the smallest viable components and then linking those components back together to facilitate complex analysis. This process, known as normalization, helps keep the data set free of duplicates and protects the data from being unintentionally deleted or unevenly updated.
As I research merchants in the eighteenth century and how they connected people and empires with far-flung locations and transfered goods and ideas across oceans, I find it helpful to break those multivalent connections into discrete units. Read more…
About the Author
Jean Bauer
Jean is an advanced graduate student in Early American history and was a Scholars' Lab Digital Humanities Fellows for 2008-2009. She is now a NINES Graduate Fellow for 2009-2010.
Read more about Jean and access her other posts here.
