My eyes were opened up today. I never really understood what it was like compliling enough information to fill a text book, especially if someone was organizing this data for the first time. Working with the source with which Drew provided us was very overwhelming, but not in a bad sense. There is so much information. The source contains letters from the director of the Academy of France in Rome, and as you can imagine, there were a lot of letters. For Itinera, we are hopefully trying to track these records to make a heirarchial types of social relationships. However, for this one person, I only have his or her last name and the date on which they were mentioned. The end goal is to figure out more, or provide a means for someone else to, or at least that is my understanding. Going about doing this, however, is a pretty big issue. Itinera was not built for this type of data, and inputting and organizing all of this data appears to be a lot of work. Personally, I have no idea who any of these people are, but I can read French, and it is still hard to pick out names, places, life roles, and relationships among other topics because I have no idea how to orient myself in this data. Hopefully, as I continue to work with it, it becomes much easier. To me, it seems similar to how people practice problems before the exam so the problems on the exams are easier. However, this is the exam and there is no practice. The saving quality is that if something goes awry, it is completely fixable. On another note, I thought this data was really cool because I felt like I was sitting in on a conversation, even if I didn't know who all the players were.