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.