The Aust Gate » letters

Finding and mapping influences

iain_emsley — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:49:12 +0000

The awesome Jonathan Gray posted an intriguing question on his blog about mapping influence in intellectual history. What he is trying to do is to map the possible routes of influence between people. In his case, it is philosophers; in mine, authors.

One of the driving ideas behind the Open Correspondence RDF was to begin identifying the people to whom Dickens wrote about books. Out of this I would like to create some visualisations of the data. You could possibly do this for the places, for example track his letters for one of the US tours.

But back to the original question. I believe this can be done (as I’ve been working on the XML issues) using Python’s rdflib. The major issue would be to get this working across version 2.4 and 3 so that any released code would be cross-platform.

Jonathan: as an open call, I’d love to work with you on this.

A change to the Letters project

iain_emsley — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 11:19:55 +0000

During the previously blogged dinner with Ben and Rufus, we talked about the nascent work on the letters project. Both have “encouraged” me (it didn’t take too much persuasion, it must be said) to move the project to the Open Knowledge Foundation and to port it to Python with a Redis backend rather than the current PHP/MySQL set up. I hope that the move will be complete soon.

Update on the Letters of Dickens

iain_emsley — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:54:54 +0000

Just started on a new version of the Dickens letters which I’m trying to improve before adding in further volumes of text and other authors.

I’ve refactored some of the code to remove some of the cruft and obsolescence. I’ve also been working on the rdf so that I can build up the RDFa links for each letter.

This will be linked to the full text search of the letter text that I’m going to explore using MySQL (which appears to be Xapian like in some parts). It is only going to be a first stop as I think that further processing might well be needed to make the links more explicit and the search more relevant. Might well look into increasing the search possibilities for finding letters.

In the future, I’m going to look into annotation bits and pieces and software.

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.