We’re back to ingesting records, as we finally got a good extract from QZAP, thanks to zine librarian Dianne Laguerta, who worked with the data as part of a Code School program. And the records are still giving us/CollectiveAccess indigestion.
I thought the QZAP ingest would go easily, since the records were already in a CollectiveAccess instance.
The immediately solvable problem was that the delimiter was a semicolon rather than the comma indicated on the map. Fixed. The dates are still a mess, but we’re accepting stoopid date fields for now. Lauren is going to see if she can work some magic via OpenRefine when she gets home from getting her hair cut in Bensonhurst. I was supposed to go to, but, predictably, wasn’t keen to leave the house.
The smaller set of QZAP records I made threw a lot of errors, but at least they ingested. When I tried to upload all 573 records, I got the same
Same map, different record set, but a record set that starts with the same 106 rows. You would think if there was an issue, it would come later. Did I do something weird to one of the spreadsheets when I copied the 100 rows? Our trusty “consultant,” as Lauren likes to call Eric (this guy I married 14 years ago after he provided open source tech support to another radical library project I was involved with) was not into helping troubleshoot yesterday, so I let it go and started working on zine content. I wrote down the zine entry topics on slips of paper and placed them in an old mug. When it’s time to figure out which topic to work on next, I draw out a slip. Today I got,
So I started working on that. Yesterday it was
We decided that several pages of bibliography would weigh down the zine, so I post a bibliography entry to the blog. We’ll give the link in our zine and will highlight some of the readings with screenshots of tweets, e.g.,
As with making a zine instead of writing a 20-page paper, the technique of tweeting an article feels more engaging to me than working on a traditional lit review, per this exchange with an archives student who does the same thing.
SORRY I KNOW I’M MEANDERING HERE. I’m deep into procrastination, in all aspects of my life, and would rather be reading The Madness of Mercury, a mystery with an astrologer as its “detective.” I wonder if this is an auspicious time to be working on a capstone project, and if there are reasons other than perimenopause hormones and work stress that I feel like a wreck right now.
NOT THE BEST JOB AT STOPPING MEANDERING. These blog posts are meant to be updates, so the short and sweet of it is that this week Lauren and I
- Made some progress toward ingesting the QZAP records
- Worked on our bibliography
- Worked on our ingest documentation
- Drafted an introduction for the zine
- Added visualizations to the data viz section of the zine
- Contacted another zine librarian about getting an extract
- Worked on the presentations page of our zine
- Made a txt file of all of our Gchats since February 2018 (This corpus has 38,608 total words and 4,494 unique word forms, and the emoji smiley faces are included. Thank you, Voyant!)
- Texted each other photos of our judgmental cats
Have a great week!
