My work on the name-database has alerted me to the importance of corpora. I realize that most academics believe that their major contribution to world knowledge is their brilliant theses, in which they demolish the work of their predecessors and suggest new understandings of history and the sources that tell it. And indeed, theses are important and new thinking makes us think hard and keep history alive (albeit in a more “modern” or updated version). However, most theses, as brilliant as they may appear at the time they were composed, tend to have a short shelf-life. Soon new scholars, proliferating new theses, sometimes even based on new sources, will demolish our brilliant ideas. This is different with databases. They too will, eventually be replaced, but first of all not so soon, and secondly, actually when they are replaced, they still serve as the basis for the new database. The work done in creating a database is not so soon lost.
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