Magazine of Early American Datasets.

A good thing from UPenn:

The Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD) is an online repository of datasets compiled by historians of early North America. MEAD preserves and makes available these datasets in their original format and as comma-separated-value files (.csv). Each body of data is also accompanied by a codebook. MEAD provides sweet, intoxicating data for your investigations of early North America and the Atlantic World.

I’m not sure why they call it a magazine (yes, the word used to mean ‘storehouse,’ but how many people know that?), but never mind, I’m glad it exists.

Comments

  1. Magazine is probably for the M to make the acronym pronounceable. Their credits list MEAD-iators.

  2. Ah, that makes sense.

  3. Jen in Edinburgh says

    You get powder magazines, but I’d never really thought about why they were called that!

  4. J.W. Brewer says

    The older style of magazine, when used to store gunpowder, was of course prone to disasters of the explosive variety. What’s the analogous disaster for an online repository of datasets?

    Then of course there’s the more recent sense “A chamber in a firearm enabling multiple rounds of ammunition to be fed into the firearm.”

  5. Romanian magazin ‘store, shop, magazine, emporium, etc.’ “Emporium of Datasets” sounds pretty inviting.

  6. David Marjanović says

    Romanian evidently got it straight from French.

  7. January First-of-May says

    store, shop

    Also in Russian, probably (I’m guessing) also from French.

  8. Vasmer says магазин and магазейн showed up in the time of Peter the Great; the first came with penultimate stress from Polish magazyn and with final stress from 18th-c. German Маgаsin (from French), the second presumably from Dutch magazijn.

  9. David Marjanović says

    Modern German Magazin “storehouse; ammo chamber in firearm; large illustrated periodical” seems like a separate borrowing; it gets a merciless spelling-pronunciation with /ts/ despite keeping its final stress.

  10. to make the acronym pronounceable

    AEAD would be indeed clunky, but then READ would have been right there… and if that’s taken for too many other things already, other readable options yet run all the way from Boutique to Zone.

  11. The word is of Arabic origin.

    Russian might have borrowed it from Western languages, but it already had another word from that root borrowed via Turkic – “kazna” (treasury).

  12. Andrej Bjelaković says

    Serbian has both magacin (storehouse) and magazin (magazine).

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