The Aust Gate » charles dickens

Exporting and querying Dickens data

iain_emsley — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:15:35 +0000

As a follow up to the posting regarding the propsed ontology, I’ve started to try and create a SPARQL endpoint. At some point soon, I want to use the new version of ARC as the version I’ve got here is a little out of date. After that the next thing should be to allow the endpoint to be converted into other forms like JSON.

UPDATE: I’ve created an endpoint using the default ARC settings here: http://austgate.co.uk/dickens/endpoint.php

Letters of Charles Dickens website

iain_emsley — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:39:31 +0000

I’ve finally posted the first draft of the Dickens website here: http://austgate.co.uk/dickens/index.php?author=Dickens. The idea is that it will allow users to derive networks across the a variety of Victorian authors as and when I can develop the datasets.

I’ve also been developing a small text ontology to add to the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) and Dublin Core (DC) ontologies. I’ll post details later. The database schema is still under development but I hope to get that change done soon so that I can get on with the XML changes.

Mining the Letters of Charles Dickens

iain_emsley — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 07:41:13 +0000

As an aside I’ve started a small project to begin visualising ways of searching the letters of Charles Dickens and exploring the Simile library which MIT have produced.

Its originally an extension to the D-Space repository tool but Rufus Pollock used in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Weaving History project – to which I contributed the Milton json data file. Originally I’d used it just for biographical timelines but thinking about it, I wondered how you could use it to mine datasets like the letters of Charles Dickens.

Dickens was a prolific letter writer (the Pilgrim edition extends to 12 thick volumes). I don’t have access to that data but I did download the first volume (of three) that his daughters edited.

Using Perl, I have extracted the date and recipient tags and converted the text file into JSON (as part of a larger process of converting the file into XML and using XSL to transform the data) and then created a table view of the data so that you can easily find the dates of the letters sent to certain people in tabular form.

I’ve also used the same data set to produce a fairly basic timeline of the letters which is being rewritten from here. It needs some rewriting to update to the new version of timeline.