Techquila Shots

Pepys-Map : 2nd December 1661

Although short, the entry for 2nd December 1661 results in quite a few separate events.

• An initial sequence in which Samuel goes to Mr. Savills; finds him out; meets Henry Moore on the way home and the pair then return to Seething Lane. This results in the following sequence of events in the topic map:
  • Samuel travels from Seething Lane to Mr. Savills place of business.
  • Samuel travels from Mr. Savills place of business and stops at some unamed place en-route to his home.
  • Samuel meets Henry Moore that the unamed place where the previous travelling event ended.
  • Samuel and Henry Moore travel from the meeting point to Pepys home.
• Pepys and Moore talk at Pepys home.
• Henry Moore dines with Samuel Pepys.
• Henry Moore takes his leave to do some work at the Lord Privy's office. This is modelled simply as a working-event taking place at the Lord Privy chambers with Moore as the worker.
• Clement Sankey and Mary Archer call on Samuel Pepys at home.
• All three go to the Opera by coach.
• A performance of 'The Mad Lover' attended by Pepys, Clement Sankey and Mary Archer.
• Clement Sankey and Mary Archer dine with Pepys at his home.

You might notice that in some cases the travelling has been modelled in more detail than in other cases. For example, Sam's return home from Mr. Savill is modelled as having two legs, but this is in some way necessary to model his meeting Henry Moore (the alternative being to simply model the meeting with Moore as being an event that occurred during the journey from Savill's to Pepyp's home). On the other hand the trio of Clement Sankey, Mary Archer and Samuel Pepys must have travelled *back* from the Opera in order to participate in the final dining-event at Pepys' home, however I have chosen not to model this particular travelling event at all as the fact that they all changed location can be deduced from the location of the performance event and the subsequent dining event and we have no additional information (such as mode of transport) to convey.

This question of the level of detail of the modelling is something that occurs in many places in the work on the diary. Another good example is the modelling of event sequencing. Right now there is an implicit event sequencing that uses sort names for the events so that they sort into (approximately) chronological order. A more explicit way to model this would be to specify the start and end points of events relative to each other (e.g. event A starts after event B). At the moment, the choice to not model this information is a question of balancing the additional manual effort against the additional information conveyed. Some helpful tooling could quite possibly change my mind...

New and updated topic maps:
Topic map for 2nd December 1661.

Cultural artifacts in the diary.
Places in the diary.

Posted by Kal at December 3, 2004 06:29 PM