What happens when you combine a history course on premodern maps, an idiosyncratic reference book based on a single 16th century atlas, and a math major who likes to code?
In this blog post series, I will take you on a tour of my experience turning the index of a physical, print history book into a digital spreadsheet that can be used to create data visualizations and explore historical questions as a part of an independent study with Professor Victoria Morse. Along the way, I will touch on topics ranging from how the project began (I was nervous asking!), to what surprising challenges came up (the letter capital J caused many problems) to how the scale of the data impacted the process (big enough to need computer science, but small enough to fix some issues by hand).
In Part 1, I’ll talk about the small project in Victoria’s course that sparked my curiosity. We will see how the index of a print book, a little bit of counting, and a little bit of data visualization can become a tool to inspire and answer more historical questions. I will describe how I got the idea to expand the project to an independent study, and then worked up the courage to ask Victoria.
In Part 2, the project expands. There are two different types of questions: what kind of data can we extract from the book, and what kind of data should we extract from the book. To answer the former, I used OCR tools available on campus and computer science techniques. I needed a few nudges of common sense to see where a few minutes of manual work can make the powerful tools much easier to use. As for the latter question, Victoria and I spent a lot of time thinking about how to handle uncertainty around dates when trying to quantify the data from the book.
In Part 3, I’ll show examples of how these techniques can generalize to different books and other materials. Nothing that I did was specific to 16th century maps; rather, it was specific to the very regular catalog-type structure of the index.
Published posts:
1. Part 1: A Small Project
2. Part 2: Data-fying a Book Index
One Comment
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