Critical Introduction to the Early Modern Care Project

Early Modern Care Dataset and Codebook

Technical Documentation

The dataset Early Modern Care is a dataset of 1022 data points presented in rows of a google sheet. Our data points are bibliographic information on Early Modern print texts (from roughly 1500-1700). The Early Modern print texts that we have chosen for this dataset are catalogued on the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) housed by the British Library (BL) and are related to our definition of Early Modern Care.

ENG 612 Final Project Abstract

Team Members: Claire Richie and Kate Albrecht

ENG 612 Lab Report 6

Dataset Analysis

Link to The Reading Early Medicine Description

ENG 612 Lab Report 5

Answers to Lab 5 Questions

Question 1: This function has split the individual words in the string and separated them by commas, but it did the same thing to the “s” that was part of the contraction “let’s.” “\W” matches any character which is not a word character, which includes the apostrophe in contractions. “+” matches repetitions of the regular expression that proceeds it. So, as well as splitting the words separated by commas and spaces in the string, the regular expression also splits the contraction and treats it as two words.

ENG 612 Lab Report 4

Answers to Lab 4 Questions

Question 1: Including stop words in the word cloud ultimately clogs up the visualization with words common across most writing in English. Words that aren’t necessarily “important” or that have particular specific meaning replace other unique words. Some of the most common words that weren’t considered stop words still appear, but are much smaller. We get less of a sense of the actual content of the articles.

ENG 612 Lab Report 3

Data Cleaning: Before and After

The dataset we tackled for this lab was, on the surface, relatively uniform. Unfortunately, the more I looked at it, the more irregularities I noticed. I was hoping to construct a regular expression that would tackle most of my needs in one go, but I quickly realized that was not at all feasible. Below I have tracked the RegEx expressions and substitutions that I used to reach the clean dataset at the end. On the whole, this took me over two hours with many trials and errors.

ENG 612 Lab Report 2

Slave Trade Database Dataset

ENG 612 Lab Report 1

Reflection on Lab 1

I found this process to be relatively straightforward, albeit frustrating at times where I could not do exactly what I wanted on my site. I’ve always found the process of creating a website somewhat intimidating, but the GitHub interface and the explicit instructions made the process very approachable. I think the most frustration I encountered was in the process of forking the theme that I wanted. Ultimately, my first choice, second choice, and third choice themes simply were not working for me, and I had to choose something that I was not particularly excited about. Not having the technical skills to troubleshoot the issues with the theme or even adjust things I don’t like on the one I have gone with is frustrating, but ultimately I hope to gain those skills in time to make my website more personalized. I have been able to adjust some things; I’ve added my social media links to the footer, changed the color scheme, and adjusted the post settings to show excerpts on the main page (with limited success, as all it shows at the moment is the header.) As I continue to play around with settings more, I am sure I will pick up on how to adjust other aspects of the site as well.