Course site for The Social Life of Books – A COPLACDigital course
Work In Progress So after many attempts at the social map I will embed a sample of what I have. Unfortunately something went wrong somewhere in my process and there are still no names attached which is very disappointing. However, it at least does look like I have some connections at least. It will be … Continue reading Social Map →
So after many attempts at the social map I will embed a sample of what I have. Unfortunately something went wrong somewhere in my process and there are still no names attached which is very disappointing. However, it at least does look like I have some connections at least. It will be interesting to get to see WHO the connections are with. In the meantime, I will post what I have and continue to work on the issue. I will update the map as soon as I have it figured out.
For this assignment we had to use the Dissenting Libraries website to discover who checked out certain books from a certain time period. I chose to do 1848-1849 from Manchester College. This one was a little more difficult for me and I feel like my data didn’t turn out the … Continue reading
For this assignment we had to use the Dissenting Libraries website to discover who checked out certain books from a certain time period. I chose to do 1848-1849 from Manchester College. This one was a little more difficult for me and I feel like my data didn’t turn out the way I expected. I didn’t have any overlapping connections, which I thought was weird and cleaning some of the data up, didn’t turn out like I thought. I got the information uploaded to Kumu, but couldn’t figure out exactly how to get it the way I wanted. I like Kumu, but the data scraping part is what confused me. I am interested in the connections I did find. It was interesting to see that John Jay Taylor had the strongest connection.
I’ve always liked to think of myself as a reasonably technologically capable person. I know the very basics of html, and have managed to poke at some pre-written page codes when I didn’t quite like them and come out with a result that pleased me. Data scraping, unfortunately, did not give that same experience. When […]
I’ve always liked to think of myself as a reasonably technologically capable person. I know the very basics of html, and have managed to poke at some pre-written page codes when I didn’t quite like them and come out with a result that pleased me.
Data scraping, unfortunately, did not give that same experience.
When I sat down to do this project, after plugging multiple years around the 1830s into the Dissenting Books search and coming back with 900-1000 results, I decided that surely going back a couple decades would yield a far smaller data set. I was correct- the year 1810 only had three pages of results. So, with a halfway giddy (only three pages!) and halfway guilty (only three pages…) conscience, I began data scraping.
The scraping process itself was not difficult. I was able to successfully scrape the data from the table, and put it into Google Sheets without a problem. In fact, I enjoyed adding all the small codes to add different columns from the table into the scraped data. I understood (mostly) what was going on, and faced no troubles on that front.
From that point on, it was downhill.
My thoughts, the further I got into this process of cleaning and copying the data, went something like this: Google Sheets is now my worst enemy. If I ever have to use Google Sheets for anything other than making a cross-stitching pattern ever again I’m going to fling my computer across the room. It was a mess of coding not working- even now, four days after I was defeated by the dragon, I’m not sure if it was human error on my part, if some of the data went wrong, or if Sheets just decided it didn’t like codes that day. Thankfully, my data set was small enough that when some things started to go wrong, I was able to simply go in and fix them myself.
Things that went wrong:
– Find and replace didn’t get rid of all the :, /, and assorted punctuation at the end of book titles, no matter what variations of the code I tried.
– Finding the weight refused to actually count the books, putting a “1” in for every single book, even when I could see five different occurrences on my screen.
– Copying and pasting values was a nightmare I could not seem to escape, and I never managed to fix it.
By the time I made it to the Connections sheet and got stuck on trying to wrangle VLOOKUP, four hours had passed, curses had poured from my mouth, and tears had been shed. It was at this point in time that I raised my figurative white flag and emailed Dr. Pauley what I’m sure was a rather disconcerting email, including a sentence that said something along the lines of “I’d rather chop off a hand than continue to do this.” (In retrospect, that line was very dramatic. I will, however, continue to stand by it.)
After Dr. Pauley swooped in and saved my Google Sheet from being abandoned completely (thank you so much, BP), I continued to avoid the data for the weekend, because I am a coward and did not want anything to do with it. However, today I finally logged back on and was pleased to have everything go smoothly with Kumu.
If you look at the map, you’ll notice something I found incredibly ironic- not a single person at Manchester Academy in 1810 checked out the same book as any other person. There are literally no connections- everyone is their own tiny map. Thanks to the weight, you can tell that some people checked out the same book multiple times. However, that it as interesting as it gets. After all of my plight to find their connections and study them, the people of 1810 said, “Checking out the same books? Nah.”
C’est la vie, I suppose. The fact that it turned out not to give me the kind of data I wanted to see will probably add to my desire to never, ever, ever in my life use data scraping and cleaning as a tool again.
You know how when renovating a room, you have to scrape all of the wallpaper off the walls and it is easy and super tedious, but you know it’s going to be worth it in the end? That’s kind of how this assignment went for me. This week we were asked to once again use […]
You know how when renovating a room, you have to scrape all of the wallpaper off the walls and it is easy and super tedious, but you know it’s going to be worth it in the end? That’s kind of how this assignment went for me. This week we were asked to once again use technology I had previously never dealt with before, and considering last week’s results, I was cautious to say the least. Surpisingly enough, I did not have as many troubles this time around. While data scraping is definitely not how I would like to spend an afternoon, much like peeling wallpaper off it was more tedious than anything.
Once I finally got all of the data, painstakingly putting it through Google Sheet after Google Sheet, I was ready to take on Kumu. Once again, I was surpised how user-friendly it was. (Maybe Zotero and I are just not meant to be.) Although there are some discrepancies with my map, such as the random gray circles that did not want to get color coded, overall it turned out pretty well.
I used the Bristol Baptist Academy’s records of 1860:
This assignment brought a whole new meaning to the process of “trial and error.” While I struggled immensely with the intricate process of data scraping, the final product gave me a special appreciation for Kumu. This data mapping site brings a special awareness to the relationships between different elements. In this case, we see the […]
This assignment brought a whole new meaning to the process of “trial and error.”
While I struggled immensely with the intricate process of data scraping, the final product gave me a special appreciation for Kumu. This data mapping site brings a special awareness to the relationships between different elements. In this case, we see the relationship between students and the books they borrowed within 1845 at Manchester Academy. I gathered this data from Dissenting Academies Online. This data started out messy and complex so it needed to be scraped and cleaned. Although the last assignment went extremely well for me, this exercise was a different story. In my opinion this map was worth the struggle. Being able to see all of the information that taunted me in such a cool visual is strangely fulfilling. Below is the end result of my attempt at data scrapping.
In our 5th assignment we were asked to explore the world of social networking maps. Above is my recreation of Dr. Pauley’s selected data of books and borrower’s of Manchester… Read More
In our 5th assignment we were asked to explore the world of social networking maps. Above is my recreation of Dr. Pauley’s selected data of books and borrower’s of Manchester Academy from January to December of 1845 for better or for worse. Enjoy!
Apparently Safari and Kumu are having domestic problems, and I suspect it is because Chrome and Kumu are in the middle of an affair. All of that is a round about way of saying that my loading problem with Kumu magically fixed itself as soon as I used Chrome. Technical difficulties aside, I really enjoyed […]
“Let’s work with web scraping and social networking,” they said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re technologically inept,” they said. But I had to go and be a special snowflake by picking my own set of data—basically making a perfectly reasonable project take ten hours more than it should have. This week, we worked on unearthing […]
“Let’s work with web scraping and social networking,” they said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re technologically inept,” they said. But I had to go and be a special snowflake by picking my own set of data—basically making a perfectly reasonable project take ten hours more than it should have.
This week, we worked on unearthing library records for dissenting academies via the Dissenting Academies Online Project. I chose to work within the calendar year 1830, focusing my search on Homerton Academy. With tools such as Kumu, Scraper, and xPath Finder (the latter two being Chrome extensions), I scraped data from the DAO database and used it to map connections between books and borrowers during that year, as seen below.
Regardless of the time I spent working on this project (due to the fact that I had to constantly seek help in fixing my own errors, because I’m a Creative Writing major and computers are hard) the end product was surprisingly cool. I didn’t even have to ask for help on Part III, which kind of made me question reality for a few minutes but it’s all cool now.
So there you have it – a comprehensive, slightly jiggly map of connections between the borrowers and the books of Homerton Academy in 1830.
First and foremost I would like to say that while I did not end up getting my version of the data into Kumu (which decided it was just going to sit at 99% loaded and stay there, I really liked this assignment. Some of it was frustrating to get to work correctly, but working with […]
First and foremost I would like to say that while I did not end up getting my version of the data into Kumu (which decided it was just going to sit at 99% loaded and stay there, I really liked this assignment. Some of it was frustrating to get to work correctly, but working with all of those different sheets gives a tangible idea of how the final product is going to look. The constant reorganization of the same information allows you to think of all the different ways in which it is connected. I think that getting to see everything in color and being able to navigate through it really highlights the connections in a more concrete light and I am very excited to see how I can utilize this in my own project!
Connections are way more important than we give them credit for in my opinion. Every single way we react to anything and everything is a connection of some kind. Some of them are fleeting and are gone in seconds, but others last lifetimes. But we don’t every really think about these connections as being tangible things, strings we can reach out and touch. Sometimes we give them material objects like wedding bands, or do our best to document them with photos. However, what I like about the Kumu project is that it gives a visible representation of the actual connection. Rather than say a picture of someone with this book, there is an actual chart of a sort that shows the different lines and connections between people and books. Now, perhaps it isn’t as romantic or exciting as the types of connections that we normally have, but with a little creativity and ingenuity I think we could create some very cool representations of connections here.
Here there be the link to my Google sheet (which I will turn into embedded sheets as soon as I remember how).
Just when I thought we were out of the worst of the complex digital thicket I discussed last week, this week’s assignment resolved to convince me otherwise. I’ll be the first to admit that this was an arduous task; I found myself almost affectionately missing last week’s mapping activity (almost). However, as was the case […]
Just when I thought we were out of the worst of the complex digital thicket I discussed last week, this week’s assignment resolved to convince me otherwise. I’ll be the first to admit that this was an arduous task; I found myself almost affectionately missing last week’s mapping activity (almost). However, as was the case last week, there is a real sense of accomplishment when I (finally) present the end product of my hard work!
This week’s assignment was all about using the innovative data-display platform Kumu. Kumu is a great way to present hefty or complex data and show the relationships that are within it. For my map, I chose to explore the loan records of Manchester Academy in its 1845 academic year. I got this data from Dissenting Academies Online, which is a vast storage of digital information that relates to the Dissenting Academies of the United Kingdom. There was a lot of data to maneuver in this exercise, but my ultimate presentation below shows just how connected everything is!