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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The ARChive of Contemporary Music website features many image galleries depicting items from the collection, including records, CDs, sheet music, music-related books, and ephemera. Since the launch of the site in May 2014, web traffic to the galleries has been relatively low, about a third of the number of users that hit the homepage. The…

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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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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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This is a project I worked on for the course “Programming for Cultural Heritage” at Pratt SILS in the fall of 2014. I became interested in the Dreweatts Auction House because I am QA’ing the website for my job at the Frick Art Reference Library’s Web Archiving Initiative. As a student of art history/library science…

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This Python 3.4 script is an attempt to build a simple web page of primary sources for a single subject. It queries resources in digital archives and special collections to retrieve metadata. It also downloads the thumbnails and URLS for the resources. This code is written to specifically find materials on the Chinese Exclusion Act….

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Introduction The Spanish Artists Dictionary (SAD) is a reference source created by scholars at the Frick Art Reference Library. Originally a print publication, the dictionary was formatted as a Filemaker database in the early 1990s and made available through the Frick’s online research portal. The database consists of 5,186 records describing Spanish artists; these records…

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For my final project I data scraped the Harry Potter Wiki site. I initially intended to create a script where I scraped all the listed character’s names and birthdates on the site. Then I planned to transpose that information onto a timeline, using Knightlab’s TimelineJS program, where a person could view the characters of the…

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