Tag: Mapping

Assignment #5 — A Book’s Owners

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:

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.

The Curious Case of the Unaccounted for Baskerville

You can imagine that along with the introduction of new research tools one would quickly pick their favorites. This tool has proved to not be included in that short list…. Read More

You can imagine that along with the introduction of new research tools one would quickly pick their favorites. This tool has proved to not be included in that short list. After searching through the English Short Title Catalogue, I found eight entries for Characteristicks by Anthony Ashley Cooper. However, curiously enough, I did not find the entry for the book located at my college which was printed in Birmingham, Alabama. This was exciting news! I plan to further investigate the origin of this book with our archivists in order to explore the curious case of the unaccounted for Baskerville further. Below, I have embedded the map displaying the locations that have known published versions of the book that the English Short Title Catalogue knows about.