As I mentioned in a previous post, my next step in Itinera is to input my Elgin Marbles-related information into the database. So far, I'm actually pretty efficient at this part.
In Itinera, I'm submitting info for agents (people), tours (their lives), and tour stops (places they visited). Right now, the main people whom I'm dealing with are Thomas Bruce (Lord Elgin), Mary Nisbet (his wife) and Giovanni Battista Lusieri (artist comissioned to draw the Marbles). There are a couple more people involved, but those are some of the more central actors. After I'm finished with the people and their lives, I'll be able to input information about the Marbles themselves.
Everything in Itinera is connected - it is a digital web of art historical information. Everything has to be precisely submitted step-by-step, and I frequently have to go back into the database to make sure that all the information is recorded correctly. It's tedious and a little bit frustrating, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.
However, I am a little concerned about the timing. My FE-R presentation is in about four weeks, and I'm worried that we'll run into more problems as we try to submit the Marbles (which will be called 'objects' in Itinera). I'm almost finished with inputting all the agents, tours and tour stops, so luckily, completing that won't take too much time out of next week. Then I can spend the rest of the day entirely devoted to putting the Marbles in Itinera. Jen and I have gone through my spreadsheet and identified about 20 sculptures or fragments of the Elgin Marbles that are ready to be put into the database. Then it's just a matter of if Itinera will organize them correctly.
At the same time, that still means that there are over 100 fragments in the British Museum alone that I won't get a chance to put in Itinera before the semester is over. I know that this database is a work in progress and we will be adding info to it for quite some time, but I wish that I had more time in the Visual Media Lab to finish up this project before the semester ends at the end of April.