I am creating a biographical database of historical photographers. I am not a programmer, alas, and am learning drupal (thru WebMatrix) for my first adventures in building a website. Hello world!
I don't yet have my info in SQl, so I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, but I'd like to toss this issue out. I have ~85,000 entries in a spreadsheet. Each entry contains the following:
Name (comprised of Title, First, Family, and Suffix fields)
Nationality
Date (either life dates, or dates of activity)
Public repositories who report owning samples of the photographer's work (I have indexed about 20 large museum/library collections)
Bibliographic sources such as other academic databases or websites, or published books or journals with information on the photographer.
Biography (a free text field for further development once I can nail down some core facts!)
Places active (also not currently much used, but will be important going forward.)
I will have questions and will need advice from the community on each of these in the future (so thanks in advance to all for any insights, sincerely!)
My current question regards the date field. I am dealing with a lot of ambiguity here. For instance, I have both photo studios and individual photographers. An individual photographer may have a birth year and/or a death year: Eadweard Muybridge (American, 1830-1904). A studio, likewise, may have a year of incorporation and a year of disincorporation. These are pretty straightforward (though I'll probably need some help for these, too). But very often I have only "active" dates, ie. some museum has a photograph dated 1867, and no other information. So I can accurately claim this photographer was "active 1860s". To make matters more complicated I have plenty of "circa" dates: born "ca. 1812" or worse: "active ca. 1890s". This is a lot of ambiguity which I really do intend to make indexable/searcheable. I don't see a module that is my silver bullet. Am I overlooking it, or is this just an insane expectation on my part? Again, all insights are greatly appreciated.
David
Comments
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There's no silver bullet module for what you want to do, but it's not a completely insane expectation. There are other applications that deal with 'approximate dates', but doing so can be complex. The best examples I can think of are genealogy applications, where it's not unusual to have date fields that read "about 1890', or 'between 1856 and 1861'. The problem, of course, is that a drupal date field expects a very specific date, or perhaps a date range between two very specific dates.
If you intend to do 'date math' with these fields (i.e. show me all nodes with a date before 1972'), then you're going to need some custom code to convert you existing date data into something concrete that drupal's date field can cope with. The best example I can think of in the drupal contrib space is the Family Tree module, which has some code that attempts to parse such 'date descriptions' into real dates or date ranges.
Family tree module
Thanks, yes Family Tree looks potentially good for me. I'd had trouble for some reason installing it, perhaps something to do with is 6.x status on my Drupal 7 installation. I'll keep my eye on it. Yes, I realize I'm going to have complex issues at every step, especially for a newbie! But I'm looking forward to the learning.