Reading Between The Lines

Seeking to learn what books can't say for themselves

Month: February 2017

Assignment 5: Social Network Mapping with Kumu

February 22, 2017 / / 0 Comments

“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.

Assignment 4: Want to know where it was published?

February 12, 2017 / / 0 Comments

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 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 3: Using TimelineJS to Retrace the Life of a Book

February 4, 2017 / / 0 Comments

I’m not sure, but I think I might have picked the one book in our Special Collections library with the absolute least notable owners in the entire world.

I don’t mean to say that any of them led boring lives, don’t get me wrong. I mean that despite the abundance of names in the provenance available to me, exactly zero of them turned up in genealogical databases, and exactly zero of them had a hand in any other publications I could find. It didn’t help that none of them had the decency to include their location (or at least, a legible one).

But I digress. Even though none of the owners seemed to leave a lasting footprint in history, it was fun to figure out who might have come first and what they did with it. It’s a fairly outdated concept, so it doesn’t see much use today, but judging from the number of names in it I suspect that it saw a great deal of use from religious figures or followers. I’m fairly certain that I’m the first person to have sifted through it so deeply in a long while.

This was an adventure. For someone as unversed in technology as me, Timeline JS might as well have been rocket science the first time I saw it despite how simple it actually was once I got down to it. The problems I encountered were mostly nuanced (often user error) so I have to say that the tool itself was actually quite useful.

So, here: the product of my puzzling. Behold the vast amount of dead-end (but still cool) provenance. I view it as a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people.

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