A while ago, I was chatting to Jonathan Gray and Liliana Bounegru about converting data. Jonathan was interested in tiny tools that I understood as a software that does one or a very few things and I was thinking about lightweight ways of converting data from Zeeschuimer into a CSV file for students. There are other tools like 4cat, but these do rely on being set up and may include other tools that might distract from what we need. In essence, sometimes we just need something small. The CSV enables it to be used within existing methods pipelines.
That evening, I sketched out and set up the first version of Zeehaven (or seaport) (PublicDataLab blog) as a simple HTML page with minimal and vanilla Javascript. It was designed to be easy and simple to maintain. It worked with Twitter data and started work on other data. That work is ongoing.
So far, so good.
Maintenance requests started to come in and I was, to be fair, slow off the mark. These continued slowly and conversations were started with the people raising bugs. Through these, I discovered that Zeehaven is being used by various courses and institutions as part of teaching and research.
So, where next?
I do need to complete some ongoing work to include at least one more platform before going onwards. It has grown organically so does need a good tidy up and refactor. It does amaze me where this has gone.
