{"id":678,"date":"2015-06-08T05:55:48","date_gmt":"2015-06-08T00:55:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nd.edu\/emorgan\/?p=678"},"modified":"2015-06-08T05:55:48","modified_gmt":"2015-06-08T00:55:48","slug":"eebo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/emorgan\/2015\/06\/eebo\/","title":{"rendered":"Developments with EEBO"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nHere some of developments with the playing of my EEBO (Early English Books Online) data.\n<\/p>\n

\nI used the repository on Box to get my content, and I mirrored it locally. [1, 2] I then looped through the content using XPath to extract rudimentary metadata, thus creating a \u201ccatalog\u201d (index). Along the way I calculated the number of words in each document and saved that as a field of each “record”. Being a tab-delimited file, it is trivial to import the catalog into my favorite spreadsheet, database, editor, or statistics program. This allowed me to browse the collection. I then used grep to search my catalog, and save the results to a file. I searched for Richard Baxter. [6, 7, 8]. I then used an R script to graph the numeric data of my search results. Currently, there are only two types: 1) dates, and 2) number of words. [9, 10, 11, 12] From these graphs I can tell that Baxter wrote a lot of relatively short things, and I can easily see when he published many of his works. (He published a lot around 1680 but little in 1665.) I then transformed the search results into a browsable HTML table. The table has hidden features. (Can you say, \u201cUsability?\u201d) For example, you can click on table headers to sort. This is cool because I want sort things by number of words. (Number of pages doesn\u2019t really tell me anything about length.) There is also a hidden link to the left of each record. Upon clicking on the blank space you can see subjects, publisher, language, and a link to the raw XML.\n<\/p>\n

\nFor a good time, I then repeated the process for things Shakespeare and things astronomy. [14, 15] Baxter took me about twelve hours worth of work, not counting the caching of the data. Combined, Shakespeare and astronomy took me less than five minutes. I then got tired.\n<\/p>\n

\nMy next steps are multi-faceted and presented in the following incomplete unordered list:\n<\/p>\n