“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.