Homerton Borrowing Map

After playing around with some of the information from Dissenting Academies, I decided that I would work with the borrowing records from Homerton in 1830. Scraping and cleaning up the… Read More

After playing around with some of the information from Dissenting Academies, I decided that I would work with the borrowing records from Homerton in 1830. Scraping and cleaning up the data took longer than I anticipated it would, but following the tutorials proved to be relatively easy and I managed to complete that part of the assignment with minimal levels of frustration. The frustration actually only kicked in when I tried to embed my Kumu project into this post. I’m still not sure what was wrong or how I eventually fixed it, but the map is here and it’s working and I’m not going to think too much about how that happened.

Even after Kumu decided to start a fight with me, I really like the idea of being able to visualize connections among books and people. I think that tools like Kumu (when it decides to cooperate) make it much easier to see how specific books actually create these links across people and space. I could see myself using this tool again at some point, maybe without so much data scraping, but I think that Kumu and I need some time apart before we can work together amicably again.

Borrowing Books during the Early 19th Century

Kumu is hands down my favorite tool we’ve used. This mapping process constructs a mesmerizing visualization of different topics – in this instance, books and who borrowed them in a… Read More

Kumu is hands down my favorite tool we’ve used. This mapping process constructs a mesmerizing visualization of different topics – in this instance, books and who borrowed them in a given time period. I chose a slightly different time from the tutorial to see if I could accomplish this assignment on my own. I chose August 1, 1825, to July 31, 1826, in order to cover a school year. I stuck with Manchester Academy because the Dissenting Academies Online website gave me a lot of listings to work with.

Though this process of searching the Dissenting Academies Online and scraping the data from that website into Google Sheets tested my patience, I was overwhelmed with joy when I completed the mapping process. By doing this, we are able to look back at a time period and easily view who borrowed a book, at what date, and how many times, if applicable. It’s basically a fun way of searching for a certain person and quickly being able to learn their book loan history. Whether they borrowed books for school education or personal curiosity, we can learn a lot about their habits.

Assignment #4 – A Book’s Location

For this assignment I decided on a whim to use Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote, knowing that there was a copy in our archives here. I struggled and struggled with the software due to my own technological ineptness, but finally after hours of having too many tabs open on my computer at once, I […]

For this assignment I decided on a whim to use Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote, knowing that there was a copy in our archives here. I struggled and struggled with the software due to my own technological ineptness, but finally after hours of having too many tabs open on my computer at once, I was able to make a map. This map shows the distribution of editions of Don Quixote from 1620 to 1799. Unsurpisingly enough, most of them were published in London (which is why it is red, because I color-coded by concentration), but there a few more here and there, obviously centralized in the UK and Ireland. As you can see, there was one stray over in Maryland, which was slightly out of place, but I guess not too odd because it was a later copy (1781).

the bouncing baby book

This week we’ve done some fun website trickery, with lots of gizmos and gadgets that I’ve never heard of before, let alone knew how to use. After some trouble with getting my numbers displayed, I finally wrangled the electronic beast and managed to put some coordinates on a map. As for the book I used, […]

This week we’ve done some fun website trickery, with lots of gizmos and gadgets that I’ve never heard of before, let alone knew how to use. After some trouble with getting my numbers displayed, I finally wrangled the electronic beast and managed to put some coordinates on a map.

As for the book I used, I revisited the book that I analyzed back in our second post, looking at how books were made- Fables by John Gay.

The Nurse, a Poem

I love this tool. I still have no idea how this happened, but I love it. After doing a search through the English Short Title Catalogue of The Nurse, a Poem by William Roscoe, I managed to create this map of all three of its publication sites(overacheiving at its finest). Considering I have struggled immensely […]

I love this tool. I still have no idea how this happened, but I love it.

After doing a search through the English Short Title Catalogue of The Nurse, a Poem by William Roscoe, I managed to create this map of all three of its publication sites(overacheiving at its finest). Considering I have struggled immensely with every aspect of technology thus far, I was amazed at how smoothly the entire process went for me. I’m so excited to get more in depth with this tool with future assignments.

Maps!

Let it be said that I have a new respect for cartographers of all kinds. Using at least five different programs for one project is not up my alley; I simply do not have the patience for it (especially not when I had to wipe everything Zotero related and start over). All in all though, […]

Let it be said that I have a new respect for cartographers of all kinds. Using at least five different programs for one project is not up my alley; I simply do not have the patience for it (especially not when I had to wipe everything Zotero related and start over). All in all though, I think the end result is amazing and I can think of hundreds of really useful applications for something like this: tracing books, people, anything really; records of conquests; labeling mathematical achievements in a certain field; looking at old wars; and so on!

Locating Jefferson’s “Notes on the States of Virginia”

While searching the English Short Title Catalogue for Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia”, I found myself perhaps a bit distraught. Not so much at the overwhelming abundance… Read More

While searching the English Short Title Catalogue for Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia”, I found myself perhaps a bit distraught. Not so much at the overwhelming abundance of printed books, but rather the underwhelming amount. For this project, I was hoping to find many, many copies of said book and map them accordingly. I pictured many, many location markers and hoped they would land all over the world. This is not so. Thomas Jefferson’s book was only listed six times on the ESTC, but amid technical problems, I was only able to successfully grab three of the listings.

I found this task to be daunting, but I welcome any task that is challenging. Jefferson’s book was located in Baltimore, Maryland, Paris, France, and London, England. Perhaps someone from Virginia read the book, later traveling to Baltimore and left it there. Perhaps a curious Maryland-er wanted to read up on their neighboring state. Maybe Thomas Jefferson himself brought along a copy of his own book. For the other two places outside of the United States, I do not have any great guesses about why they were located there.

Without further ado, here is my (small) map showing the distributions of “Notes on the State of Virginia.”

Mapping Mr. Gray

This assignment had us mapping the various locations in which a particular book was published. We used the English Short Title Catalogue to find publications of the book of our choice, which ideally had to be published sometime in the 18th century. While we could have used any 18th century book that the ESTC could find […]

This assignment had us mapping the various locations in which a particular book was published. We used the English Short Title Catalogue to find publications of the book of our choice, which ideally had to be published sometime in the 18th century. While we could have used any 18th century book that the ESTC could find for this assignment, I was curious about one book from my college library’s Special Collections in particular: The Poems of Mr. Gray by Thomas Gray. Their version was published in Dublin in 1775 and is part of the Rare section of the Special Collections. As my nifty, (mockingly) simple(-looking) map shows, this book was published in three different cities total: Dublin, London, and York.

I have mixed feelings about this section of the course. We are being introduced to different types of technology with the intent to give us a more expansive digital toolbox with which to build our final project. On one hand, this is completely necessary to create an interesting and worthwhile project, while on the other, it is slowly turning me into a computer gremlin. Figuring out this assignment had me sitting and staring at my increasingly harsh computer screen (for much longer than I probably should’ve had to), daylight slipping quickly away from me before my next real-world experience was realizing my room had gone pitch black and I emerged from this cave as a wild-eyed creature mumbling “geocode” nonsense at my concerned roommates.

I guess that’s just the nature of the beast.

 

Mapping “Aristotle’s Masterpiece”

For this assignment, I have to admit, I was more than a little daunted by the amount of technology I would be working with. I’ve used Zotero and the ESTC… Read More

For this assignment, I have to admit, I was more than a little daunted by the amount of technology I would be working with. I’ve used Zotero and the ESTC before, albeit to a lesser extent than what this assignment called for, but trying to figure out OpenRefine (really just installing it) was not a pleasant task. But after I started actually working with my data, I found that the tutorial worked wonders, and sifting through the information was easier than I thought it would be.

The book I chose to work with, “Aristotle’s Masterpiece,” is a lovable source I had worked with for my history capstone project. I’ve actually looked at it’s records in the ESTC before, so I knew that there would be several cities to map, so here they are!

Where Was This Book Published?

For this week’s assignment, we had to use The English Short Title Catalogue to track down the publication locations of a particular book our university owns that was published in the 18th century. I chose The tender husband; or, The accomplished fools. : A comedy by Sir Richard Steele. With … Continue reading

For this week’s assignment, we had to use The English Short Title Catalogue to track down the publication locations of a particular book our university owns that was published in the 18th century. I chose The tender husband; or, The accomplished fools. : A comedy by Sir Richard Steele. With a title like “Sir,” I was pretty confident that at least one of the locations this work was published would be in England. Unsurprisingly, it was most often published in London, England! The second most published place was in Dublin, Ireland and, finally, one lonely copy was published in Glasgow.