○. The Old Norse World

This project is still in its inception. It has two very broad aims:

1. To define the major reference points for concepts used by those working on the early Nordic regions and related areas including the people, places, material objects, words and texts which are referred to by different projects.
2. To provide a forum for documenting and analysing that material which includes a full peer-review process and a means for publication recognised by most research funding and assessment bodies.

1. Reference points

Defining the structure

The current resource is built on the skaldic database. There have been a number of major structural changes to the database to incorporate these concepts, but more work needs to be done:

• People: The categories in this concept currently belong to different tables. Skalds and authors are listed in the ‘skalds’ table, along with some non-people categories of anonymous material. Historical persons are included in the ‘thing’ table, along with Norse and Classical mythological beings and named objects, which probably should form part of this category given the overlap between the mythological, legendary, historical and literary in the corpus. The ‘thing’ table also includes places, which belongs to a different category, plus other material which should probably be removed.
• Texts: There has been lots of work here to incorporate all prose and poetic works into a single table (‘text’), including non-Norse texts. In addition, these are divided into standard divisions — chapters and stanzas — which are numbered. Some standardisation needs to be done on these where the divisions are not authoritative. The current list is based on the ONP Registre, Sagnanet.is and the Skaldic Project, with some minor additions and modifications.
• Places: Places and their names are included in the ‘thing’ table but largely use a different set of columns from the biographical entries. These should easily be removed from the thing table and put into their own table which incorporates the geographical elements.
• Objects: Unique objects which provide texts, images or other information about the Old Norse world have been incorporated into a single table, with a facitily for adding images and linking text. Some minor manipulation is needed here. The list in the database is based on the ONP Registre, the old Sagnanet.is site
• Books: The bibliographic database is based on the Skaldic Project and incorporates tables for works, journals and authors, as well as images. The interface could be improved and better incorporated with other bibliographic resources.

Populating the resource and resolving conflicts

Managing the data in each category needs to be done carefully.

[to be expanded...]

2. Formalising publication

There are some processes that need to be done in order to make the resource appropriate for scholarly reference and assessment:

• Appointment of an editorial board
• Development of a peer review mechanism
• Definition of serialisation of the output (journal + issues/volumes, etc.)
• Development of print output
• Application for an ISSN
• Development of DOI name resolution (funding required)

References