We were victims of our own success. Because we were able to generate the printing\/publishing map of a text using the British Short Title Catalogue with only moderate pain and a few tears, we were all tasked with generating a map via scraping information from the Dissenting Academies Online website.<\/p>\n
Upon beginning this task, I took a deep breath and whispered to myself, “This won’t hurt that<\/em> much”.\u00a0 Boy, was I wrong.\u00a0 When deciding on query to ask of the Dissenting Academies Online website, I\u00a0settled for the library records spanning from 1843-1844.\u00a0 There were over 1,000 results from this search.\u00a0 To keep myself from going mad, I used the first 17 sheets of results.\u00a0 I know this is only a minor dent in ALL of the data.\u00a0 However, from what I used one can still see a few interesting trends, such as the same person repeatedly checking out the same book.\u00a0 As mentioned in class, this possibly happened because many of the academies would not allow their books to physically leave the library.<\/p>\n The art of scraping a website, while not my strong suite, was not terrible.\u00a0 I was pleasantly surprised.\u00a0 However, while it was all outlined for us in elaborate walkthroughs, manipulating the data in Google Sheets proved to be an expletive inducing experience. There was a “son of a b*@%#” here, and a “f!&*” there; nothing too out of the normal.<\/p>\n Once I “tamed” the data (or thought I had); it was time to wrestle with Kumu.\u00a0 In one corner, there was me: an\u00a0already battle-worn SLOB warrior (who was still having flashbacks about last weeks “bloodshed”).\u00a0 Then in the other corner was Kumu:\u00a0 a new, fresh-faced opponent, whose methods and tactics in the ring were still unknown to me.\u00a0 Unfortunately, to be very anticlimactic, Kumu was fairly simple to use.\u00a0 The only frustrating part was figuring out what was up with three sections of my Google Sheets data.\u00a0 While I never exactly figured out what was wrong with the data, I was still able to generate a map.\u00a0 Is the map beautiful?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 Does the map make much sense?\u00a0 Not really.\u00a0 However, what I did get out of this is potentially a new skill that I not only can apply for later in this class with our final project, but, it also has the potential to be used in other areas of my academic life.<\/p>\n