Tag: Books

Through a Digital Glass Darkly: Early English Books Online

Image of early english book pages

The digital artifact known as Early English Books Online (EEBO) is a resource for research on British history and literature between 1473 and 1700. EEBO is a collection of 146,000 mostly English works accessible via an online database, available by subscription from ProQuest. In this article I first review the history of EEBO, which began with cataloging efforts more than a century ago, through the processes that developed the online version used by so many scholars today. I then critically review its limitations, and discuss some of the challenges and drawbacks inherent in the transformation of analog source materials into digital form, including information distortion and loss, format obsolescence, and the challenges of digital preservation.

Annotation: Mining the Social Web

Chart of Connections among the Twitter users

While mining the Information Science Virtual Library for academic papers on "social media" and "data mining," I came across Matthew Russell's O'Reilly book Mining the Social Web: Data Mining Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Github, and More. The 2nd edition was published in October 2013, with a 3rd edition scheduled for publication next month. Because the book covers the specific techniques I'm after concerning data mining and analysis of social media, I decided to pull the trigger and buy the book right now. 

The book is basically a tutorial on data mining social media sites using Python. Alas all the source code it references is in Python 2.7 and I've been working with version 3.6, but that's fine. It also covers using IPython Notebooks and even begins with a guide to setting things up on a virtual server. I'll probably wait to actually do that until I see what's new in the 3rd edition. But the book definitely makes the final cut for my annotated bibliography. With that as a given, I thought it would be useful to get started with the first annotation.