About this site 14Dec2008
We’re starting in the middle of things (as always). I’ve maintained a research-blogging presence for the past year or so on Phylo Blog, where I recap our latest site development, data finds, and future plans. I recently came across Michael Jasenas’ A History of the Bibliography of Philosophy, and I thought it would be good to read the book online, so to speak, by posting commentary on each chapter. The material is rather obscure (it seems I’m the first person to check the book out of the Queens College library since 1973), but very germane to the documentation and classification efforts involved in Phylo.
This commentary strikes me as something beyond my usual Phylo blogging—much more associated with research on the history of the field than the development of Phylo itself—and I also have the occasional desire to blog about certain ideas or developments in the field. In short, it’s time to start a new blog that frees up space for different content.
Since I think my work with Phylo is of significant research interest, I’ll be cross-posting those entries here as well (thank you WP-o-Matic) and collecting this research blogging together with my other professional materials (e.g., CV, teaching documents, contact info).
This is my first time using WordPress as a CMS (content management system) to run an entire site, including static pages on each of my courses, as well as a teaching statement. I’ve debated using some CMS for my site for a long time, especially given how easily it’s updated. As usual, I was drawn to drupal, but since the research blog will receive the most frequent updates, blogging-oriented software seemed most appropriate. So far, I’m pleased with the results.
The site theme is based on ClockWorkSimple by ClockWorkBlogger. I’ve made several modifications, mainly to accommodate pages vs. blog posts.
Pre-1975 North American dissertations added 9Dec2008
Last month, I finished cross-referencing Thomas Bechtle and Mary Riley’s Dissertations in Philosophy Accepted at American Universities, 1861-1975 (New York: Garland, 1978) against other sources of philosophy dissertations, including Dissertation Abstracts International, The Pragmatism Cybrary, and various library catalogs.
As described in the preface, Bechtle and Riley compiled a preliminary list from standard sources, including Dissertation Abstracts International and Comprehensive Dissertation Index, and attempted to contact university libraries to verify each dissertation. The resulting list contains 7,503 dissertations. By far, this is the most methodological index I’ve come across, but I think it’s still important to verify entries against other sources when we’re not consulting a hard copy of the dissertation.
Our final list turned up 7,429 dissertations, including several hundred we consulted at libraries in summer 2007. These have all been added to the database, bringing our total number of dissertations up to the 9,000 range.
In addition, 1,087 dissertations were listed in at least one source and still need to be verified, probably by checking library catalogs. Once this is done, Phylo will contain every North American dissertation written in philosophy before 1975.
As a preview, I’ll start doing the same cross-checking for post-1975 dissertations in January. By far, the most helpful source here will be Review of Metaphysics, which has published an annual list of dissertations since 1957.
