Category: #books

Week 4: Progress

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” – Frederick Douglass Upon meeting with Dr. Pauley this past week, I was able to hone in on what I am… Read More

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” – Frederick Douglass

Upon meeting with Dr. Pauley this past week, I was able to hone in on what I am actually trying to convey as my message to my final project. I am switching gears just a little bit. I’m still doing the project over Notes on the State of Virginia, I am just focusing my project to show the books in the different Oklahoma universities and public libraries. This collection of copies and editions that reside in Oklahoma surprised me, if I could be quite honest. I figure the book is popular amongst the historians/history professors, students, etc. who are interested in Jefferson or maybe they really want to know more about Virginia in the 18th century. Either way, I’m just glad to say I finally feel comfortable with my project.

This week is my finals week, and I’d be lying if I said I’m looking forward to my Microeconomics final on Wednesday. It’s actually stressful enough to give me heart palpitations.

Pertaining to my project, I now have a more narrowed-down list of Notes that reside in the different surrounding universities. Once I know I have a completed list (my goal for Thursday), I will then create my Google map of Oklahoma and plot the different copies at the varying locations. I will also start my timeline at this point.

The end is very near, but once I survive my finals, I can focus all of my attention on finishing this project the way I would like.

Week 3: Pre-Finals Week

It’s like I’m back in the first week, feeling the pressures of classes ending – except they are literally ending in four days. EVERYTHING is fine. Finals week is next… Read More

It’s like I’m back in the first week, feeling the pressures of classes ending – except they are literally ending in four days. EVERYTHING is fine. Finals week is next week. EVERYTHING is still fine.

This week has not been overly productive as I haven’t been able to meet up with my librarian to talk to her about the book. She knows the history of the book and how it came to our campus. With Kelly being the only librarian, apart from her assistant, even at a small campus there is not enough of her to go around. Our schedules have clashed as the end of the semester comes to a close, but I will be setting up a time to talk with her this week.

I managed to borrow the copy of the “Notes on the State of Virginia” we have in our library – the copy I can actually take out of the library. I snapped some photos of the few differences I found between the new, 1955 edition, and the 1801 archive book we have. I can only keep the newer edition out until the end of the semester (due in 10 days), so I may have to talk to Kelly in order to keep it a few days longer if needed. USAO’s semester ends earlier than this COPLAC class does, so I’ll be battling with timing.

Update on last week’s promise: I do not have my completed list of books, but it’s still in the works.

April 3rd, 2017 Final Project Update

This week Loganne is working on putting the Storyline JS part of the project together, while I continue to work on designing the website and get some pictures taken. The hardest problem we’re having this week is figuring out a time that we can go to our special collections together. … Continue reading

This week Loganne is working on putting the Storyline JS part of the project together, while I continue to work on designing the website and get some pictures taken. The hardest problem we’re having this week is figuring out a time that we can go to our special collections together. Our schedules don’t match up this week so I’m probably going to have to go and get whatever pictures I can by myself this week and take some of us together next week or when we have a chance. It’s registration time on our campus right now so everything is crazy and kind of stressful. We’re powering through, though! We’re hoping to have Storyline JS completed this week.

Week 2: Internet Scavenger Hunt

The internet can be a peculiar thing of information. Seemingly infinite, but it doesn’t cooperate when you truly want it to. Last week, I ran into the wall of only… Read More

The internet can be a peculiar thing of information. Seemingly infinite, but it doesn’t cooperate when you truly want it to. Last week, I ran into the wall of only finding the editions of “Notes” I had found prior to this final project. After gaining some insight and help into other ways to research this book, I was able to locate and create a list of the books found on those websites.

I have yet to thoroughly search through the records to see if they are duplicates or not. I also have some information I need to look into on my campus and talk with my librarian. That is my main goal this week – along with compiling all of this information into a readable spreadsheet of publication location and year.

March 27, 2017 Update on Final Project

Time for weekly updates! Loganne and I have found the majority of the information we are going to use for the final project. We were to our archives last week and found about 15 books from the 19th century that we are going to use to find a comparison between … Continue reading

Time for weekly updates!

Loganne and I have found the majority of the information we are going to use for the final project. We were to our archives last week and found about 15 books from the 19th century that we are going to use to find a comparison between where they were originally published versus where Nolan Moore bought them at auction. It didn’t take us as long as we thought it would, considering we gave our selves two weeks to do our research and it took us about two hours. Always better to give yourself more time than not enough! I am working on website design now and Loganne is working on making our maps. We’re hoping to have most of this done this week, but it might go into next. I feel really confident in where we are at with our project and am excited for us to do a little more research on it to learn more of the history behind the collection!

Who Borrowed These Books?

For this assignment we had to use the Dissenting Libraries website to discover who checked out certain books from a certain time period. I chose to do 1848-1849 from Manchester College. This one was a little more difficult for me and I feel like my data didn’t turn out the … Continue reading

For this assignment we had to use the Dissenting Libraries website to discover who checked out certain books from a certain time period. I chose to do 1848-1849 from Manchester College. This one was a little more difficult for me and I feel like my data didn’t turn out the way I expected. I didn’t have any overlapping connections, which I thought was weird and cleaning some of the data up, didn’t turn out like I thought. I got the information uploaded to Kumu, but couldn’t figure out exactly how to get it the way I wanted. I like Kumu, but the data scraping part is what confused me. I am interested in the connections I did find. It was interesting to see that John Jay Taylor had the strongest connection.

Assignment 5: Social Network Mapping with Kumu

“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 […]

“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.

Borrowing Books during the Early 19th Century

Kumu is hands down my favorite tool we’ve used. This mapping process constructs a mesmerizing visualization of different topics – in this instance, books and who borrowed them in a… Read More

Kumu is hands down my favorite tool we’ve used. This mapping process constructs a mesmerizing visualization of different topics – in this instance, books and who borrowed them in a given time period. I chose a slightly different time from the tutorial to see if I could accomplish this assignment on my own. I chose August 1, 1825, to July 31, 1826, in order to cover a school year. I stuck with Manchester Academy because the Dissenting Academies Online website gave me a lot of listings to work with.

Though this process of searching the Dissenting Academies Online and scraping the data from that website into Google Sheets tested my patience, I was overwhelmed with joy when I completed the mapping process. By doing this, we are able to look back at a time period and easily view who borrowed a book, at what date, and how many times, if applicable. It’s basically a fun way of searching for a certain person and quickly being able to learn their book loan history. Whether they borrowed books for school education or personal curiosity, we can learn a lot about their habits.

Locating Jefferson’s “Notes on the States of Virginia”

While searching the English Short Title Catalogue for Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia”, I found myself perhaps a bit distraught. Not so much at the overwhelming abundance… Read More

While searching the English Short Title Catalogue for Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia”, I found myself perhaps a bit distraught. Not so much at the overwhelming abundance of printed books, but rather the underwhelming amount. For this project, I was hoping to find many, many copies of said book and map them accordingly. I pictured many, many location markers and hoped they would land all over the world. This is not so. Thomas Jefferson’s book was only listed six times on the ESTC, but amid technical problems, I was only able to successfully grab three of the listings.

I found this task to be daunting, but I welcome any task that is challenging. Jefferson’s book was located in Baltimore, Maryland, Paris, France, and London, England. Perhaps someone from Virginia read the book, later traveling to Baltimore and left it there. Perhaps a curious Maryland-er wanted to read up on their neighboring state. Maybe Thomas Jefferson himself brought along a copy of his own book. For the other two places outside of the United States, I do not have any great guesses about why they were located there.

Without further ado, here is my (small) map showing the distributions of “Notes on the State of Virginia.”

The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Provenance Timeline

This week for The Social Life of Books, we had to find a book with evidence of provenance and create a timeline of ownership. I chose the Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This book was particularly interesting because there were lots of marks and writings throughout it as … Continue reading

This week for The Social Life of Books, we had to find a book with evidence of provenance and create a timeline of ownership. I chose the Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This book was particularly interesting because there were lots of marks and writings throughout it as evidenced in the gallery above. I had a lot of fun with this assignment, because in my research, I found that three of the four previous owners are from Wichita Falls, Texas where I go to school at Midwestern State University. Although I couldn’t find out a lot on one of the owners, I found three of the four to be related, so before it was donated to my university, it was passed down through a couple generations of the McGregor family. I really liked learning more about each owner and how Mrs. A. H. Carrigan was the daughter of one of the founders of Wichita Falls. It was really neat learning more about the history of the small town where I go to school. At one point, I even had to get Dr. Pauley and Dr. Bankhurst to help me interpret an Outline Descendant Report on Patsy McGregor. I would love to continue researching the previous owners of this book to try to find more on Patsy and Mr. Henkle.

Timeline JS was a little confusing at first, but I think I figured it out.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with this assignment and would love to do another one like it.