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 from Dissenting Academies database:
Authors = Blue dots
Books = Yellow dots