Visualizing Caribbean Literary Encounters: Progress Report 5

Report / February 08, 2022 / 2 Comments

During the course of this week, Luam and I filled the column in the spreadsheet that was designated to the author of the book’s country of origin. This column did not have many fields with information previously entered due to the column being an extra in the Zotero. This means that this column was an add on and had to be manually entered with each new entry. Thus we had to find the location of the author with the use of the Wikipedia links offered. If there was no Wikipedia link then we had to do research on the author of the book with the use of Google. This went smoothly for most books, however, in the case of books that were published by lesser well-known authors more thorough digging had to be done. Furthermore, when finding information about the author and their country, we had to ensure that the time period of the book being published and the author being born agreed. There were a few cases of the author found not being born around the publication date of the book, this was due to the surname and first name being entered into the search engine in the wrong order. Thankfully, this error was caught and rectified. Another issue, mainly in the later published books was that the author was a professor at a university, this made finding the author’s country difficult as instead of stating where the author was from, most of the sources stated their place of work. Another problem faced, was choosing whether to use the author’s place of birth or place of residence as their country. This was also the problem with authors with heritage from the Caribbean who resided elsewhere. It was later decided that we would use the author’s place of birth. While fulfilling the task of completing the column, I learned that the author of “Everything, Everything”, Nicola Yoon is Jamaican-American. This piqued my interest as I have been obsessed with the movie adaptation of the book.