Literature Review: Mariana 1
Dec. 29th, 2021 08:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prayergardensThe best resource I have found so far on the topic of Mary Gardens is the John Stokes and Mary's Gardens collection at the University of Dayton. John Stokes studied and promoted Mary Gardens and left nearly 40 years of work to the university library. His work was on topics, "including Marian symbolism of flowers and herbs, Catholic mysticism, medieval gardens, and the Mary's Gardens movement." (link)
A succinct definition of Mary Gardens is that 'they have their origins in medieval European flower symbolism, where flowers such as roses and lilies and marigolds acted as physical reminders of particular characteristics of the Virgin Mary'.
The University of Dayton Library has posted much of the research done by John Stokes. A lot of the analytical research is in typewritten pages scanned into pdfs. I would like to see a searchable and sortable database so that will be my first big project. My goal is to convert the many pages from pdf to spreadsheet in their original forms and then combine them into one large, searchable Mary Gardens knowledge base.
Once all the data is assembled, I'll then be able to start doing research and analysis that furthers the literature on this subject. I also hope to get the data into a form where people can collaborate and add/edit directly to the database as well.
I have increased my excel skills quite a bit and found a source that will convert pdfs to excel and then, additionally, found some advanced formulas to help clean up the data. Because the typewritten pages were not as uniform as a database, the conversion requires manually fixing it in places. Mariana 1 has over 600 entries and I've been able to clean up about 100 so far. I was hoping to have them done this week but holidays and parenting came first.
If anyone has any suggestions about pdf to excel conversion or free online hosting beyond the big G, please let me know. Airtable seems to be the best online database hosting option I've seen so far but I'm open.
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