Welcome to An Leabharlann Ghealach, a database for Irish and Celtic source texts. This website will allow users to log and cite texts, keep track of secondary analyses, and discover new texts in the network. An Leabharlann will help keep track of all editions and translations of a text and where they can be found online.
Neo4j is a graph database language designed to store data as nodes, and connections between data as relationships. Unlike traditional databases that use tables, Neo4j organizes data into a graph structure, making it ideal for representing complex relationships, such as those between authors, texts, editions, publishers, websites, and text versions in this application.
A node has properties, and a relationship connects nodes. For example, if we had a node for Homer, it would look like this:
And if we had a node for the Iliad, it could look like this:
Then we could relate them by saying that Homer WROTE The Iliad:
You can see that each node is given a label, here "Author" and "Text". The name of the author and title of the text are properties stored within a node. All nodes have labels telling you what they are, while the properties of a node tell you about the data stored within. So Homer IS AN Author, and the Iliad IS A Text. This feature will become useful later when we discuss searching through the database. Note that a node can have an arbitrary number of labels, e.g. James Clarence Mangan IS AN Author and IS A Translator.
Due to the complexity of relationships in the humanities, no rigid structure could ever capture the unruly relationships of a humanities database without itself becoming unruly. But Neo4j allows users to set relationships that could be unique, as well as relationships that are extremely common. To capture all of these, users can create many different labels to suit their needs.
A node consists of a label and a list of properties and their values. There is no limit on what a label or property could be, although the value of a property must be a string or simple array, not a JSON object.
For example, the Audacht Morainn is a medieval Irish document. It is a Text. But Fergus Kelly's 1970 translation of the Audacht Morainn is an Edition and a Translation of that Text, not a Text itself. The two are connected with an EDITION_OF relationship. And Fergus Kelly TRANSLATED the Audacht Morainn. So we can create nodes with those properties, and connect them:
See Labels below for a full list of all labels used and how to use them.
Columns, searching, and logging in.
Creating a node, adding labels, node properties, and relationships.
Nodes connect to each other through relationships.
A list of all currently used labels and when / how to use each:
Used for all people who write, edit, or translate a Text.
A Text is the pure form of a document or writing, the Platonic ideal of a text, not associated with any edition or translation.
For example, the Iliad is a Text, written by Homer. Robert Fagles' 1990 book titled "The Iliad" by Homer, published by Penguin Classics, in which he translates the epic into English, is also the Iliad by Homer, but not the pure Text itself. Rather, it is an Edition and Translation of the Text.
The Text is an umbrella category under which are organized all other nodes related to that Text.
A printed or published instantiation of a Text, which appears on its own as a standalone book or article, or is published in a journal, or is contained in an anthology.
A book like The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is a Text, and all the many printings and reprintings of that book are its Editions; but at the same time, a Text like the Bretha Déin Chécht was published in Ériu Vol. XX, along with a new translation, and both the original text and translation count as Editions of the original Text.
An organization or person that publishes works on any medium.
A Translation is an Edition which has been translated from its native language to another language. A Translation must have a Translator and derive from a source Text or Version, which represents the work in its native language (though these requirements aren't enforced in the database code).
Certain ancient Texts can also be Translations. For example, the Latin Vulgate Bible is a translation of a number of previous Biblical texts in Old Italic, Greek, Hebrew, etc., translated by Saint Jerome; yet it is an important divergence from those source texts in its own right, and there are many Versions of the Vulgate, so it may be both a Text, not an Edition, and a Translation at once.
Points from an Author to a Text or Edition that he wrote. This should also be used for the editor of a work, even if that person didn't specifically author the text itself.