DHM 280

Prompt – Connect something we learned about or did during the week to an interest of your own. This could be a personal, educational, or professional interest

In class, we read Who Reads What? Readers and Genres of Fiction in Goodreads, Principal Developers: Scott Enderle and Rahul Dhakecha, and talked about a type of map that was connected to different book genres. We learned about the type of map it was, what the different points were, and talked about the popularity side of it and the metrics of it as well. I was realy interested in todays lesson because I am a big reader myself and connecting this to Goodreads caught my eye. Two words that were used were omnivorous and univiores. Omnivorous is a reader that is open to reading all kinds of genres but still has their favorites, and univores is someone who is very picky about what they read and mainly sticks to one specific genre. The map was very interesting because it was broken down genre, and you could also move your mouse over the different points and get actual data that shows how many books from each genre a person reads. One of the questions on the bottom was where would you place yourself on this map? It got me thinking back to earlier this week when I was talking to my cousin about different books. We are both very univores readers and stick to mainly romance novels. She brodens her horizons a little bit more than I do, but not my much. By looking at all the data on the map, I was able to place my cousin and I on the map based on where we would fall.

I also thought it was interesting to see how the map could show something about a person just based on the types of books they read. I never really thought about my reading habits in terms of data or numbers before this class. I usually just know that I like romance books and tend to pick books from that genre when I am looking for something new to read. Seeing the different genres and how readers were grouped together made me realize that people can have very different reading habits. Some people may read a little bit of everything, while others, like me, can stay in one genre for a long time. I also think Goodreads is a good example of how data can be used to understand people’s interests and habits in a way that is easy to understand visually. Overall, I enjoyed this lesson because it connected something I already enjoy, reading, to data and mapping in a way that I had never really thought about before.

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Introduction to The Salem Transcripton Project 

Sources:

• Salem court records (950 documents)
• The Salem Witchcraft Papers
• Digitized and re-transcribed manuscripts, mostly borrowed from Boston area archives and museums
• “Church Book Belonging to Salem Village? of 1692-3 written by the aggressive witch-hunter pastor of Salem Village, the Reverend Samuel Parris.”
• Geographic maps of the town of Salem in 1700, a separate map of Salem Village in 1692, and a map of the house locations of 17th century Andover
• Letters and personal notes (and even a couple books) from various villagers of Salem

Process:

• Created a dynamic map showing locations, dates, and names of the accused and the spread of accusations
• Archived, transcribed, and/or digitized as many known Salem documents as possible from the period, including court docs, maps, books/notes, etc.
• Geologically located the execution site in Salem with help from other scholars and previous written information about it (It was originally lost to history due to Salem’s erasure of its past)
• Created a searchable list of all 1400-ish names mentioned to be related to Salem during the time period

Presentation:

• Books and letters (both images of them and typed transcription)
  • Same with transcription of court documents
• Digitized maps/images of maps from the period
• Profiles detailing the lives/contributions of Salem residents during the period
• Links to archives from libraries/archivists across the nation

The project that I looked at was about Philadelphia immigration (https://phillyimmigration.nunncenter.net/gallery). The sources in this project were personal interviews, archival interviews from the 1980s, and also the Philadelphia Library. This project shows interviews from 117 people that were immigrants that lived in Philadelphia. The process in this project were just a bunch of interviews. All the interviews were actually made by West Chester students and they interviewed 20 people living in Philadelphia today that are immigrants. The rest of the interviews were archival interviews from people in the early 1980s. Finally, the presentation. The presentation shows all the interviews, on the first page there is a link to every person that was interviewed. All of the interviews are audio recording so you can’t read what they say in them you have to listen to them. The second page is just a background paragraph about everyone that was interviewed by the WCU students. The third page are a bunch of smaller projects these include podcasts, to historical writing pieces. The fourth slide is the archive which provides all of the sources that were used in creating this project. Overall here are the sources, process, and presentation that are apart of this project.

https://gr.pennds.org/adultfiction

Sources

Goodreads, a social reading website, randomly selected about 1,750 highly active Goodreads users in 2017. Specifically users who had posted at least 150 reviews

Process

Look at the genres readers assign to books through their Goodreads shelves. Each book is assigned to a genre based on how its readers tend to categorize it. For example, if most readers shelve a book as a mystery, it gets classified in the Mystery/Crime category

An algorithm called t-SNE is used to compare those profiles and compare how similar readers are to one another.

Presentation

Presented as an interactive Bokeh visualization. Each reader appears as a colored dot on a map, 

Nearby dots = readers with similar genre tastes.

Different colors = different primary genres.

Readers surrounded by mostly the same color are described as “univores,” meaning they mainly stick to one genre.

Readers located among many different colors are more “omnivorous,” meaning they read several different genres.

I chose this out of the Lehigh section. When I clicked on it brought up a map about all the early paintings from different cities. It had sources for the printing such as the dates they were printed the location and details of the paper making. I visited the records of some to learn more about the paintings and who and where they were from. They used a data range that you can go through yourself, and it shows how printing went up and got more popular throughout the years. They use the map as the main source it looks like just to really show to people and to make it easier to understand where everything was from. I think a lot of different people helped to put this together and all the different ways to view the maps and sources.

http://marathon.neu.edu/

sources- this article had written reflections and personal stories, from the people affected by the bombing of the marathon. another one would be memorials

publishing- the articles had been placed online with aloud people from the outside to view the article

processing- photographs, videos and interviews and stories were easy for the public to view

https://salem.lib.virginia.edu/home.html

I decided to look into the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project which was a online digital archive that allows people to be able to study and learn about the Trials. There are tons of different souces including court records, record books, personal letters, diary of Samuel Sewell, historical maps and tons of documents. The process was the different documents, books, etc were digitized and organized into one site. The presentation of the site was set up in a very organized way allowing me to click into the differents sections and sources I wanted to find and learn about. It was very easy to naviagte and find different artifacts.

Through looking at this project I discovered a lot about how these types of projects are put together. To start, I discovered that this project looks to connect teachers and scholars with the writings by women that were primarily published before the victorian era, or the year 1850. To do this, they have an encoding process that uses XML to put english or english translated works into their database. While all of this information is accessible to the public the actual project itself is held under a subscription. For this reason it was difficult to find much about how the information is actually presented but the website does mention that the project includes syllabi and other resources specifically to help teachers explore the database with their classes.