Finding the War

Database Technology and Historical Narrative

Finding the War: Database Technology and Historical Narrative is a project that seeks to find new ways to perform historical research utilizing the latest relational database software. My dissertation research concerns the social and cultural experiences of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. The nature of this project requires evidence to be drawn from a large number of disparate sources, piecing together aspects of a collective experience through careful organization and analysis of seemingly unconnected bits of historical ephemera. A poem written by a soldier, for example, is different than an editorial in an underground newspaper. The weighting of these categories of evidence is one of the central tasks of any historian; however, by entering my research into a carefully constructed digital database, I hope to discover innovative methods for collecting and analyzing data from a wide range of sources.

Relational database software (such as FileMaker Pro, Microsoft Access, and Oracle) allows users to customize categories of information and organize data in infinite varieties. Each bit of data (oral history, book excerpt, song lyric, statistic, etc.) that I uncover will have its own individual record; as a collection of data, however, these individual records will then relate to each other via a system of tags and keywords. Ultimately I hope this project will allow me to explore my evidence in a visually compelling manner that will enrich my historical narrative.