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.

Social Network Mapping, Part II: Massaging Data in Google Sheets

In Part I, we used the Scraper extension for Chrome to get data out of Dissenting Academies Online and into Google Sheets. In this section, we’ll use Google Sheets to get our data into the format we need to import into Kumu. Continue reading “Social Network Mapping, Part II: Massaging Data in Google Sheets”

Assignment #5: Social Network Mapping, Part I: Scraping Data from Dissenting Academies Online

For our exercise in social network mapping, we’ll use the cloud service Kumu (if you haven’t set up an account yet, do so now). Kumu is a good tool to use for exploring and showing connections among people, concepts, etc.

Continue reading “Assignment #5: Social Network Mapping, Part I: Scraping Data from Dissenting Academies Online”

Map of Publication

The Child’s Instructor I found a few publications on a text called “The Child’s Instructor” by John Ely. It was published at various locations between the years of 1758-1847. The map below provides an excellent visual as to the distance of which the book was published. Mainly, in the northern states is where it was found … Continue reading Map of Publication →

The Child’s Instructor

I found a few publications on a text called “The Child’s Instructor” by John Ely. It was published at various locations between the years of 1758-1847. The map below provides an excellent visual as to the distance of which the book was published. Mainly, in the northern states is where it was found as you can see below.

Making a Map for Good, Ole “Characteristicks”.

For this COPLAC assignment, I’m returning to a dear friend “Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times” by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury. The edition of this book that we have access to at the UVA Wise Library is supposedly a Baskerville book printed in Birmingham, England. I was curious as to where else the book had been printed, and a quick trip to the English Short Titles Catalog did not disappoint. I have confirmations that it was printed in London, Glasgow, and Dublin. I wasn’t surprised at all to see that the book had also been printed in Dublin, because Irish reproduction of books is something that has been mentioned many times during lecture.

Assignment 4: Want to know where it was published?

Ironically, seeing as I have very little experience with Christianity in any of its forms—personal, academic, or anything in between—I seem to have been gravitating toward religious texts in this course. This is probably due to the time period in which we’ve been working, but hey—it works, and I’m learning. This week, we pored over […]

This week, we pored over the English Short Title Catalogue (which WordPress is trying to tell me is spelled wrong because I’m in the United States) in search of books published a) prior to 1800, and b) in at least three different places. I accidentally stumbled upon John Bunyan’s “Come and welcome to Jesus Christ” while searching for the very few records of books I’ve worked with personally.

The process of getting and refining all the information was messy, to say the least, but barring the six straight hours spent troubleshooting installation (and no, I’m not exaggerating), I’ll admit that it went smoother than expected in the end. It’s not a map that boasts fifty different cities of publication, but—thanks to OpenRefine, Zotero, Google Maps, and a lot of help from Dr. Benjamin Pauley (thank you, thank you, thank you)—it’s a functioning map, and an accurate one at that.

Behold, a map that answers the burning question that I’m sure has been plaguing you since birth: where was John Bunyan’s “Come and welcome to Jesus Christ” published?

Assignment #4: From Zotero to a Map

Note: In this exercise, we’re taking a problem (“How do I put a bunch of library catalog records on a map?”) and breaking it down into several smaller steps. We’re going to end up moving back and forth among a couple of different tools, and using each one to complete one particular part of the larger problem. This can end up being a little confusing, but I’ve tried to describe each of these steps deliberately. Take it one step at a time…

Step 0: Installation

Before you begin: I’m assuming you’ve installed Zotero and the English Short Title Catalogue site translators, that you’ve installed Open Refine, and that you have a Google Drive account.
Continue reading “Assignment #4: From Zotero to a Map”

Maps Using Google Fusion Tables

This tutorial aims to help students create a simple map using Google Fusion Tables. Google Fusion Tables is an online data management application that enables you to share and publish data on the web. It also allows you to visualize this data in different ways, including in various charts and maps. Ease of use aside, the greatest benefit of creating a map with Fusion Table is that the application allows you to utilize the functions and information found in Google Maps.

Continue reading “Maps Using Google Fusion Tables”

a book’s lineage

When fellow student and researcher Savannah Willard and I went back to the archives to begin this week’s project, we had initially set our sights on a particular copy of Don Quixote that Carey (the school’s archivist) had shown us during one of our earlier visits. The little book was full of marginalia that came with […]

When fellow student and researcher Savannah Willard and I went back to the archives to begin this week’s project, we had initially set our sights on a particular copy of Don Quixote that Carey (the school’s archivist) had shown us during one of our earlier visits. The little book was full of marginalia that came with existing in a school library. However, by happenstance of one of the two of us pulling this unassuming old book off of the shelves, we found ourselves much more intrigued by this text.

Finding the history of this book was a larger undertaking than either of us realized, involving Danish languages (which neither Savannah nor myself are fluent in) and Norwegian lineage (which is very complicated, we came to find out). But the process was an enjoyable one, and the two of us were fascinated the entire time. Below are our findings.

Assignment #3 – A Book’s Life

New software, new language, and a new way to think of books, these are the oppurtunities that this week’s assignment has given me. We were asked to pick a book with a deep, preferrably mappable history and create a timeline of its life (see below). This project was intimidating at first, but once Mary Haynes and I got going, it actully gave us some really amazing insights into just what a book can hold if you look deep enough. The book we ended up using was actually discovered on a whim; I happened to grab it off the shelf and notice that it definitely was not in English. Ultimately it were the signs of ownership that caught our attention, and you’ll see why in the timeline. We thought that using the unfamiliar timeline software was going to be the most intimidating part of this project, but it turns out that translating Danish and using Norwegian census data is a lot more difficult. Even so, we made it work and discovered some facinating things about just how far a book can travel.