RESEARCH BREAKTHROUGH (of sorts) As many of you are aware, I am engaged on a survey and study of the barbell motif in the Great Basin. Around the same time as I began this group I devised the gridded map (with some help from Robert Mark) that is fixed at the top of this group. My intention with the grid, as well as having it serve as a location buffer of sorts on the site, was to see how ubiquitous in the GB the motif really was. Once that was determined I could work on defining the variations and see what correlations might turn up. I figured I needed a data base to do that with and having absolute zero experience with them I made very slow headway in designing one. But in the meantime the influx of examples increased exponentially as membership in the group expanded. Rather than wait to collect those examples later, I would save them, with the persons name, date and that they were from this group and the alpha/numeric grid location. I just keep adding those to my hard drive, prefacing the file name with barbell to make them easy to find later. It finally dawned on me the other day that instead of waiting for the database to put these in that there was a way to do it now. Simply make 160 folders each named for a grid location and save pictures to the appropriate file as I found them. Well duh--a no brainer and forty five minutes later (with some googling to figure out how to sequentially number folders etc.) I have saved countless hours of sorting later. I suppose many would have done this the very first thing, but it took me getting frustrated enough with the way I was going to do something, to actually devise a method that I could be DOING it NOW. In retrospect I seem pretty dumb. Oh well, in a few weeks I hope to have sorted the hundreds on my hard drive into the folders and have a preliminary answer to the initial hypothesis about them being all over the GB and some observations about where there may be concentrations of them. I will share that info here when I get it. I have shared all this because I know that many of us have a favorite motif that we delight in finding examples of and I think that a widespread survey of locations for nearly any motif will in the long run reveal some interesting information. So thats how I am doing it, maybe it will work for you too.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 15:09:56 +0000
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