About The North: The Filing Cabinet
This Filing Cabinet is the equivalent of the boxes of system cards I maintained in my student days. They provided content for the footnotes in assignments—details that didn't fit neatly into the text's main body —and signalled to whoever marked the assignment that I knew who, what, and where these people, places, items, and entities were. They were meant to show I wasn't just dropping names.
Fifty-something years on, this digital version serves two purposes.
First, each card provides the basic information — the who, what, where or when. That information is supplemented by links to the sources it was drawn from; in most cases, hyperlinks take the reader to the online sources.
Where I have compiled a more detailed document, a link in the sidebar delivers the reader to the relevant PDF.
Although the cards still sit in (virtual) boxes, some are duplicated and attached to a booklet in the filing cabinet. The card contains the basic information; the booklet provides additional detail.
The main card box is — predictably — The North, subdivided into the categories that provide the who, what, where and when.
Other boxes relate to Places — organised by continent/ocean — with material that does not fit neatly into those boxes sorted into four time periods:
- Deep Time, from the Big Bang to the beginning of the Holocene Epoch, approximately 12 million years ago;
- Ancient Time, from the beginning of the Holocene epoch (approximately 12 million years ago), through the start of the Current Era just over 2000 years ago, until the end of the Roman Empire with 500 CE as an arbitrary end point. This covers Prehistory and Ancient History.
- Historic Time from the end of the Roman Empire (with 500 CE as an arbitrary starting point) to the beginning of the 20th century, and
- Recent Time covering the 20th and 21st centuries.
