This page contains the following sections:
• Finding Information in the BABD
• Visualizing Relationships in the BABD
• Using Information from the BABD
• Citing the BABD

Finding Information in the BABD

Each entry contains information about a text or media object and indicates its relationships to other texts or media objects. Entries can be located and organized by three methods, which can also be used within sets of results to further limit or sort them.

(1) You can FILTER entries by parameters like People, Languages, or Genre/Type Descriptors. Filters locate terms in the entries’ metadata, so, for instance, filtering by Person finds a name identified as having a role in creation (such as Author, Recording Artist, or Director). If you heard that Edward Gorey drew Beowulf and want to know more, or wonder if there is a translation of the poem into Latvian, or are interested in Beowulf-related comic books, FILTER is the best tool. More than one filter can be used. (Remember to turn off unwanted filters before running a fresh search.)

(2) You can SEARCH for words that are contained within entries. If you want to find out whether any BABD entry mentions the Alamo, zombies, Jindyworobak poetry, or the Beatles, the open word-search is the way. (Multiple words are not bound together in the search operation; if you want a bound phrase, use quotation marks.) There is also a separate "go to" search box for an entry’s unique record number, if you already know the number of a specific entry you want to see.

(3) By scrolling down the landing page of the database, you will see the start of a table listing all entries in the BABD, displayed in groups of 50. Like a spreadsheet, the table can be ordered by any of its columns (such as Date or Title), ascending or descending, by clicking the top of the column. The default display order is by Date, from earliest to latest.

Visualizing Relationships in the BABD

Each entry displays any relationships in which that work participates. The default is to display them in the form of a verbal list, with links to the entries of other connected works. Beneath this list is a button labeled "Visualize Relationships."

The visualization feature creates a diagram of works connected to each other and can be zoomed or scrolled/dragged. Each node is also a link to the related work's BABD entry. The vertical dimension is time: earlier works are above, and later works below. The length of connectors represents, proportionally, the amount of time between works. (This can result in very long lines between works that are widely separated in time, but the ability to represent the passage of time proportionally is useful often enough to justify the odd appearance of a few cases.) Hovering over a connecting line displays a pop-up label of the nature of the relationship.

Using Information from the BABD

The Beowulf’s Afterlives Bibliographic Database is a free, open access reference work. Its data can be exported and used for any scholarly, educational, or creative purpose. It is not, however, a repository of common knowledge or a mere compilation from prior sources; it contains much original bibliographic research and commentary, and it independently verifies or corrects previously available information. For these reasons, use of the BABD should be credited.

Citing the BABD

Here is the information needed to support citation of the BABD:

• Its title is Beowulf’s Afterlives Bibliographic Database.
• The author of its content is Britt Mize.
• Its programmer (full-stack web developer) is Bryan Tarpley.
• Its place of publication is College Station, Texas.
• Its publisher (host) is the Center of Digital Humanities Research, which is part of Texas A&M University.
• Its date of publication is 2018-2024. (It went live in 2018 and has been continually expanded and developed since that time.)
• Its URL is http://beowulf.dh.tamu.edu.

Each entry in the BABD has a unique record number, displayed in the upper left-hand corner of the entry. These numbers identify individual entries, so they can be used in citation much like a page number in a book. Each entry also contains a “Last Modified” date, so when you give your own date of access in a citation, a later user will be able to know whether the entry has undergone any change since then.