Here’s a weird thing I’m working on: while discussing where I’d like to go next time I visit Europe, I started writing down all the different museums that I wanted to see, and what was in them.
As I stared at it, I realized, “Wow, this would make an amazing little pivot table.”
And so I’ve started treating it like a database, and (at some point, once I’m really happy with it, I suppose) I’ll release it for folks to use as a tool to plan their own trips.
You may not use pivot tables (or you might consider them witchcraft), but they’re remarkably useful for this. In particular, you’ll be able to use the same data to organize the information as you wish.
I’ve started entering deities, discovery sites, museums, countries (both of origin and of display), and a few other variables.
Here’s what it looks like organized by deity:
Using that, you can say, “I want to see all the museums I have to visit to see all the stuff we’ve found that is clearly an Esus piece.” And boom, you have three museums to visit, listed conveniently above!
But let’s say you have a layover in France and don’t have a lot of time to visit a bunch of museums, so you want to get the most bang for your buck. What museum should you go to? Well, organize by museum instead, and get this information:
Now, you can better plan which museum to hit in order to get the largest number of statues and inscriptions that interest you!
There’s a lot more data to load; like, about a hundred lines more. And I have to double-check it. But this is a cool little project that I think is going to be really, really helpful to a lot of folks.
Once it’s ready, I’ll make a patron-only post with the full dataset attached, and some useful pivots already run for your convenience before I release it out at some later date.
[Thanks to Catherine H. for some particular help in mentally organizing this.]
