I was surprised and delighted to find a statement predating the founding of The Magnus Institute. The great thing about epistolic communications in the pre-modern era was how they tended to write thoroughly and completely, knowing that letters can take weeks or months to be delivered. It’s disappointing that nothing can be found about the…

I am gaining new sympathy for my colleagues who work in anthropology. The problem with personal accounts is that they often disregard information that they feel is common knowledge like surnames and the year things were recorded (I am looking at you Jonathan). Much like Jonathan, I dismissed poor Martin as being a vaguely incompetent…

I have spent the last day tweaking my data schema and fleshing out meta data, things only a librarian would describe as “fun”. A great deal of the people involved with these transcripts are either dead or missing so I have begun tracking that along with key dates and locations. I am glad, though, that…

I am halfway through the first folder of transcripts so I will be taking some time to go back and review my work. It’s been an enjoyable challenging to come up with a data schema to encompass these strange works, but I am sure that I missed things. It’s hard to know when a person…

Everyone thinks they want a massive old house until they find out about the heating (and the plumbing). These old places were built before air conditioning and so they often have high ceiling to allow the heat to rise in the summer. The problem with that is that the heat also rises in the colder…

I found another link! Maybe these things are the product of Britain actually being a small island and so the random chances of two people having related stories being higher, but it’s still a bit of a thrill. As a librarian I obviously adore books and the written word, though I have to ask who…

I was excited last night about finding a link to a previous statement so I ended up staying up way too late annotating a few more. Unfortunately the next batch of statements, while certainly eerie, don’t seem to be linked to anything. Is there a pattern here or am I just see shadows that aren’t…

I slept poorly in my borrowed night clothes and temporary bed. I felt like I was sloshing around all night in my dreams from the sound of this endless rain. I have a raging headache which isn’t helping my mood. Since I woke up early I decided to read one more transcript before starting my…

The rain has continue today, but has now reached levels commonly referred to as “torrential”. It sounds as though someone has pointed a fire hose at the windows. Underneath the white noise of the rain I can hear heavy gusts of wind and the whole house is creaking. Sat here in the wood paneled library…

It rained all day today. The mansion felt even more dark and dismal as I went about my cataloging today. I wasn’t especially looking forward to staying late to annotate more transcripts. Rain makes me sleepy and I half considered giving up this silly project. No one is expecting me to do this so no…