The Research Process Again

It has been more than ten years since I blogged about how I research history and archaeology and philology. The world has changed since. Some events in November and December gave me a story to share with my gentle readers again.

For my project on linen armour I am reading all the dictionaries of the Romance and Germanic languages in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE (there was scale armour backed with six layers of linen in the twelfth century BCE, but that is a different story). In November I got around to Joan Coromines‘ dictionaries of Castilian (dominant Spanish) and Catalan (other than Portugese, the Romance language which was best able to resist being assimilated into Castilian, possibly because it was similar to Occitan and people traveled back and forth along the coast between cities which used the King of France’s coins and cities which used the King of Spain’s coins). Coromines (he/him) was a philologist who spent his time in exile from Franco writing dictionaries, like Marc Bloch spent his time on the run from the Gestapo writing an Apologie pour l’histoire. Many historical dictionaries have been converted to databases and hooked up to websites, but his dictionaries have not. Somewhere in one of his works I found a reference to an inventory from 1307 in what I thought was the Revue des Linguistique Romane. And thus began an adventure!

When I got home I did some catalogue and web searches and found volume 4 of the Revue des Linguistique Romane. Finding journals that disappeared in the 19th or 20th century can be a long process, because while they are often in the public domain, nobody has will and resources to scan them and mark them up with metadata. Learned societies are run by volunteer labour on a small budget, and there is no money in hundred-year-old scholarship like there is in selling the latest bioscience paper. Grey market services such as sci-hub rely on commercial services scanning papers. Sometimes old journals are on paywalled collections of academic journals such as JSTOR. Other times they are on free archives of academic papers such as Persee. Commercial, nonproffit, and academic collections tend to be carefully catalogued and easy to search. But there are also messy collections of scans such as the Internet Archive, Google Books, and the Hathi Trust. Many of these were scanned by Google which was not interested in working closely with librarians. The Internet Archive has limited resources and a philosophy of archiving first, sorting later. So if a journal is in the Google Books corpus, it is usually scanned as a whole book not broken up into handy articles, and you often have to flip through different files to find the correct one. The metadata is brief and not always to be trusted, and sometimes the same volume was scanned more than once in different libraries. Occasionally nobody has scanned it at all, such as the journal with Robert von Fischer’s evaluation of the logistics of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece.

Eventually I found that the Société de Linguistique romane still exists and has scans of the back issues of its journals online as RLiR électronique. But volume 4 does not have a page 377 at all! Was the dictionary wrong? Sometimes academics or printers make mistakes, especially in the days before Xerox machines and digital typesetting or even ballpoint pens.

So on Saturday November 23rd I biked to the university of Victoria after visiting my bank to drop off some paperwork. I made my way back to the third floor to find that the dictionaries were not on the shelves. I found them in the sorting area on the other side of the elevator. One volume of one dictionary was still missing, but the five or six volumes were still enough to make me stagger as I looked for a desk and sat down to work. I found the entry and read the citation RLR iv, 377. I opened up volume 1 and found the list of bibliographic abbreviations at the beginning. And lo! There are two very similar journals, the Revue des Linguistique Romane, Paris, 1925 and following, and Revue des Langues Romanes, Montpellier, 1870 and following. The abbreviation seemed to refer to the second journal.

I took some more notes about various entries in pencil on scrap paper then headed down to the basement of the McPherson Library to check the compact shelving. In the past months I learned to work the cranks to move the groups of shelves which I want to move. We did not have paper copies of the right issues of Revue des Langues Romanes, which is not surprising because the University of Victoria was founded in 1963 and its oldest ancestor, Victoria College, was established in 1903. So I biked home.

If a journal from before WW II is not listed in your library’s catalogue, and you don’t know another specific place to search such as Persee for French publications, you have to try general resources. Search engines were not designed for academic or scholarly research, but they are powerful.

Googling Revue des Langues Romanes on DuckDuckGo pointed me to https://journals.openedition.org/rlr/index.html?lang=en which is open access but only has issues since 2015. After exploring the site I clicked back to the search results and found https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=revlanguesromanes which points to the Internet Archive or Gallica scan of each issue until 1939. A human took the time to sort out the missing or incorrect metadata on the online scans. Volume 4 of Revue des Langues Romanes does have an inventory from 1307 on page 377, so my quest was completed. Not only that, I discovered that this journal has a series of transcribed inventories from the medieval Spanish kingdoms, which contain interesting passages other than the one cited in the dictionary entry. There is a vast amount of work to be done simply finding, reading, and organizing sources published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century before the cult of research and the decline of antiquarianism diverted people’s time in new directions.

My research life is not a tale of high adventure but a shaggy dog story. The citation was correct and pointed to a journal which is online, I just had to know how to interpret the citation and find the journal. And the inventory was moderately interesting and opens future paths to research but may or may not make its way into the project on linen armour. But if you have not done library and archival research in the past few years, I hope you are intrigued at the mix of paper and PDFs, specialized research tools and the Internet Archive, well-funded projects and sites in simple HTML coded by someone in slow times at work.

I write this blog to pay it forward to all the other people of the Internet who have helped and entertained me over the years. But if you can support this site I appreciate it.

(scheduled 23 November 2024)