Zooming In and Out: Theories of Poetry from Checking the Periodical Poetry Index

As the intermediary stage in the Periodical Poetry Index process, checking bridges the input of data through indexing and its output in encoding. Our earliest conceptions of this step assumed it would require simply editing citations for accuracy and correcting any typos from the data entry process; however, in practice, checking has evolved into an activity that requires rethinking assumptions about this process and about the nature of poetry as it was published in nineteenth-century periodicals. Indeed, this iterative approach to the checking portion of Periodical Poetry has illuminated, among other trends, a surprisingly common practice of publishing poems in groups.

From the earliest stages of this project, we recognized the importance of reviewing the data collected through the indexing process, and after mere months into our work together we had devised a circular approach where we each checked the poems indexed by one of our collaborators. Our initial goal for this stage was to ensure each entry included the correct bibliographic details, something we believed essential to creating a high-quality digital index; thus, we called the stage "checking," as if we were students reviewing the answers on a peer's exam. Other terms used for this type of work include "editing," which comes with implicit connections to textual scholarship and scholarly editions of a work, and "data cleaning," which as David Mimno observes, problematically implies "that there is some kind of pure or clean data buried in a thin layer of non-clean data, and that one need only hose the dataset off to reveal the hard porcelain underneath the muck."¹ Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz consider the vagueness of the phrase, lamenting that "the specifics of 'data cleaning' are not described anywhere but reside in the general professional practices, materials, personal histories, and tools of the researchers."² In response, they suggest this "obscuring language … should be a strong invitation to scrutinize, perhaps reimagine, and almost certainly rename this part of our practice."³ In our approach to this part of the workflow, we have recognized the incredible value of an iterative approach in which we return to the periodical, just like the indexer in the previous stage.

What We Mean by Checking

Because it is not as commonly used to denote this sort of work, the term "checking" allows us to define what this part of our process includes. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, checking is "to control (a statement, account, etc.) by some method of comparison; to compare one account, observation, entry, etc., with another, or with certified data, with the object of ensuring accuracy and authenticity."⁴ Indeed, the purpose of ensuring accuracy was our primary intention for checking, and with that in mind, the work of checking seemed the mundane part of our workflow, essentially scanning a spreadsheet of poems for errors and making small adjustments to commas in the first lines or correcting places where the poet's printed initials were transposed in indexing. In practice, however, the checking stage requires balancing both closer and more distant views of the data, not only looking at the page of the periodical to confirm the indexed entry is correct but also considering the trends and connections that appear across the larger collection of poems. In this stage we make sense of discoveries about our data.

Throughout our various rounds of checking, we have always focused on correcting any minor errors from the indexing process. During the checking process, we also update entries based on changes to our data collection categories, such as poem length, which we adjusted after realizing we needed to account for very long poems over one hundred lines. For example, in 2014 we began rechecking items that had been checked in 2011, so the entries needed poet and signature gender, updates to the number of lines, and changes to the title fields. The multiple spreadsheets of poems indexed from the early decades of Blackwood's, 1817 to 1845, included 1,544 poems. To streamline the process of checking, the entries were consolidated into a master spreadsheet and sorted...