A recorder of folk music around the world, Alan Lomax is largely responsible for the existence of many of the classic blues and other field recordings that exist today, including recordings by Bessie Smith, Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, and more. Today his recordings are held at the Library of Congress, but from 1942…

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Repurposing Archival Metadata with the Python CSV WriterProject Presentation.

James Van Der Zee was a self-taught African American photographer of the 20th century. He photographed the lives of African American predominately in Harlem where his first photo studio opened in 1916. Currently his photography collection is available at The Met and many of his phots can be viewed on their website. My project has…

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Exploring Wikidata Properties With the Linked Jazz Name Directory My project is focused on exploring Wikidata as a source of linked data, using data from the Linked Jazz project as a starting point. The Linked Jazz project is focused on exploring linked open data in the context of cultural institutions. Linked Jazz aims to discover…

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This WordPress site is the product of scraping the online tsuba collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The BMFA has a large digitized collection online which can be searched through their website. This site focuses on the tsubas in the collection. A tsuba is a hand guard for a japanese sword usually found…

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The goal of this project is to perform a preliminary investigation on the quality, thoroughness, and implicit biases found on the semantic web. The focus of my work is DBpedia, a crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and make this information available on the Web. As one of the largest source of…

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Background For my PFCH project, I started out working with API to extract data. When I saw instructions from API provider, I realized there are a lot of limitations to what I could do with APIs. I learnt that many websites have APIs to help developers with data extraction. While APIs are created to be…

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Major League Baseball has inducted 310 people into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, dating back to the Hall’s first class of inductees in 1936. The members of the Hall of Fame (HOF) include iconic American figures, such as Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, familiar even to non-baseball fans. Additionally the Metropolitan Museum of Art…

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Background: This project was inspired by our involvement with Linked Jazz, a research project based at Pratt Institute that investigates the application of Linked Open Data technologies to digital cultural heritage materials. The work is built on a collection of 50+ jazz oral history transcripts from which relationships between jazz musicians are derived. When the…

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For my project, I used the Victoria & Albert Museum’s API (http://www.vam.ac.uk/api/). I found the API to be more usable than other museum APIs because it offers a Query Builder, which allowed me to build a URL; the Builder made it clear which parameters I needed to use when writing my script. I chose to…

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Background This project is the first half of a Linked Open Data Fellowship, a joint effort of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Pratt School of Information. Our goal: to explore potential linked open data projects for the Whitney using their rich data on artist and objects of the permanent collection. As a…

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What was known as ‘The Golden Age of American Circus’ lasted, roughly, from the last quarter of the 1800’s through 1950. During that time, circus as an industry got a huge boost from the expansion of the transcontinental rail system and managed to survive the Great Depression. The poster advertisements from this era remain so…

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For this project, I chose to explore some of the online data about Old Time Radio, which is usually defined as the radio shows that aired between 1920’s-early 1960’s. While there is a huge amount of information about these shows online, much of it is incomplete, difficult to access, and spread apart. I wanted to…

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The Free Music Archive (FMA) is an online library of free, legal music downloads maintained by WFMU and curated by dozens of cultural institutions and music-minded organizations. FMA provides a framework for hosting and sharing new output and its library currently features about 16,000 artists. Part of this framework is the detailed assignment of metadata…

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For my final project, I used Twitter’s REST API and a Twitter library for python, called twitter-python, to acquire the timelines of over 500 self-identified teachers on Twitter. I then used python to parse, extract, and structure the user timeline data for a visualization program. I was interested in seeing the ways in which teachers…

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Analyzing Modernism: Modern and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a data analysis and visualization capstone project for Programming for Cultural Heritage, a practical seminar based at Pratt Institute’s School of Information and Library Science. This project consolidates paintings- and sculpture-related metadata corresponding to the Museum’s Department of Modern and…

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Originally the aim of this project was to search two cultural heritage institutions, the Walters Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, to isolate objects on a collection level – specifically manuscripts – and then distill this data on an item level. A script was written in Python for each museum to pull the relevant data. The…

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Our project, Artists’ Books Holdings, is an attempt to analyze and visualize data about artists’ books holdings on an international scale. This project is a work in progress created for LIS 664-Programming for Cultural Heritage (PFCH) at Pratt Institute. It illustrates our ability to work with data in a programmatic manner and create visualizations that…

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This project is a timeline from 1915 to the present showing headlines with the words “birth control” from the New York Times. We wrote a script in Python (nytimes_api.py) to pull the relevant data from the NYT Article Search API; this included the publish date, a text snippet, and the URL to the full article….

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BACKGROUND: This project’s naissance was in the bottom shelves of a local history & genealogy department of a middling public library in Maine. Resting on those shelves are cemetery maps, names and dates-data one could employ to find the resting place of an ancestor, or fodder for any number of studies and stories-cloistered in binders,…

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