Posts with tag Genres

Now back to some texts for a bit. Last spring, I posted a few times about the possibilities for reading genders in large collections of books. I didn’t follow up because I have some concerns about just what to do with this sort of pronoun data. But after talking about it to Ryan Cordell’s class at Northeastern last week, I wanted to think a little bit more about the representation of male and female subjects in late-19th century texts. Further spurs were Matt Jockers recently posted the pronoun usage in his corpus of novels; Jeana Jorgensen pointed to recent research by Kathleen Ragan that suggests that editorial and teller effects have a massive effect on the gender of protagonists in folk tales. Bookworm gives a great platform for looking at this sort of question.

One of the most important services a computer can provide for us is a different way of reading. It’s fast, bad at grammar, good at counting, and generally provides a different perspective on texts we already know in one way.

And though a text can be a book, it can also be something much larger. Take library call numbers. Library of Congress headings classifications are probably the best hierarchical classification of books we’ll ever get. Certainly they’re the best human-done hierarchical classification. It’s literally taken decades for librarians to amass the card catalogs we have now, with their classifications of every book in every university library down to several degrees of specificity. But they’re also a little foreign, at times, and it’s not clear how well they’ll correspond to machine-centric ways of categorizing books. I’ve been playing around with some of the data on LCC headings classes and subclasses with some vague ideas of what it might be useful for and how we can use categorized genre to learn about patterns in intellectual history. This post is the first part of that.

Genre information is important and interesting. Using the smaller of my two book databases, I can get some pretty good genre information about some fields I’m interested in for my dissertation by using the Library of Congress classifications for the books. I’m going to start with the difference between psychology and philosophy. I’ve already got some more interesting stuff than these basic charts, but I think a constrained comparison like this should be somewhat more clear.

I finally got some call numbers. Not for everything, but for a better portion than I thought I would: about 7,600 records, or c. 30% of my books.

The HathiTrust Bibliographic API is great. What a resource. There are a few odd tricks I had to put in to account for their integrating various catalogs together (Michigan call numbers are filed under MARC 050 (Library of Congress catalog), while California ones are filed under MARC 090 (local catalog), for instance, although they both seem to be basically an LCC scheme). But the openness is fantastic–you just plug in OCLC or LCCN identifiers into a url string to get an xml record. It’s possible to get a lot of OCLCs, in particular, by scraping Internet Archive pages. I haven’t yet found a good way to go the opposite direction, though: from a large number of specially chosen Hathi catalogue items to IA books.