CIA map of mujaheddin groups, 1985. “Peshawar Scrapin’” is my name for a project I undertook for my Government Information and Programming for Cultural Heritage classes in library school at Pratt. It is named for the Peshawar Seven, or the loose alliance of seven anti-Soviet mujaheddin groups who received US and Pakistani support during the…

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In the Fall of 2017, Ernie Garcia, a reporter for Lower Hudson Valley’s Journal News, e-introduced me to Masha Turchinsky, the Director of the Hudson River Museum. I was looking for an internship in archives and databases and the museum just so happened to be looking for someone to bring elements of their Google Cultural…

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DOCUMENTING ICE was created in Prof. Matt Miller’s course, Programming for Cultural Heritage at Pratt’s School of Information by Mia Bruner. My goal was to see how programming could act as a tool to compile a central collection of records documenting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: FOIA requests, detention facilities, available government records, and resources….

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Visualizing the Paston Letters Network displays the network generated between letter writers and recipients from the Paston Letters and Documents collection. This collection contains primary sources from the Paston family, a fifteenth-century gentry family from Norfolk, England. The material for this project came from Norman Davies’ edition of Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth…

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Even as amateur Python coders, scripts can help ease the tediousness and concentration of time when working with data. This project is our exploration of python coding, in order to analyze what government and media information expresses about different aspects of the LGBTQ community in the United States. Vist project site for more info and…

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This project examines library cataloging practice versus user-generated metadata for hip-hop and rap music. I chose to compare subject fields used for albums classified as Rap (Music) in MARC records versus last.fm tag metadata for the same albums..

For this project, I looked at card data from Magic the Gathering by using the “all sets” MTG JSON file found at mtgjson.com. This file sorts all cards data by the set they were released in. I was interested in measuring two aspects of the card data: word frequency in flavor text, and “power creep,”…

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For this project, I wanted to explore the coverage of ghosts and haunted houses by The New York Times. I am the Senior Taxonomist for The New York Times and part of my work is to promote our archives and the use of our tool TimesMachine. I was inspired to do this research while looking…

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For this project I chose to explore datasets related to historic landmarks in New York State, which includes individual landmarks, i.e. historic houses, monuments, etc., and historic districts, which are usually whole neighborhoods or large portions of neighborhoods. All of this information was ultimately pulled from New York State’s open data project. I exported the…

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About the Project “Monday Night Wars: Data From Wrestling’s Golden Age” is a project that uses python programming and data visualization techniques to unpack and era of professional wrestling called “Monday Night Wars.” The project was created by Kate Meizner for LIS-664 at Pratt SI. “Monday Night Wars” references a six year ratings battle between…

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I chose to webscrape the Brooklyn Historical Society’s digital images collection for my final project. I thought this might be easily achieved because the site itself presents all search results in a table that seemed like it would be easy to loop through. My initial goal was to create a map in Google Maps with…

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Before photography there was drawing. Scientists and artists around the world first used illustrations to depict natural flora and fauna for study. Some of these scientific illustrations are so detailed that they can still be recognized as the species today (Biological Illustration, 2016). The study of Mollusks has always interested me. I have been collecting…

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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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Museum APIs are an excellent resource for exploring information in collection records that public facing collection search interfaces (e.g., those found on most museum websites) do not provide access to. This project utilizes the Rijksmuseum API and the Getty Research Institute’s Union List of Artist Names Vocabulary (ULAN) to take a closer look at the…

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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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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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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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Repurposing Archival Metadata with the Python CSV WriterProject Presentation.

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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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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