This is an algorithmic toolkit for R, designed for fully transparent quantitative analysis of the British Library ESTC Data Collection. Note that the package is under active, open development; the tools, analysis, and documentation are being constantly updated. Your contributions, bug reports and feedback are welcome!
This pilot phase focuses on the metadata for c. 50,000 documents on 'history' during 1477-1800 from the ESTC library catalogue. The results are summarized in the following automatically generated files:
- Overall summary of the 50,000 ESTC history documents
- Document sizes across time
- Edinburgh summaries
- North America summaries
- Princeton summaries
- Scotland summaries
- LIBER Figures
- Various summary tables of the data.
The steps to reproduce these summaries from the raw data are fully described at the tutorial page. This includes several steps from raw data extraction to harmonizing the textual annotation fields, preprocessing the information, and carrying out statistical analysis and visualization. The ESTC raw data is confidential and available only on a separate agreement, so we can only publish statistical summaries and the our own analysis source code at this site. The process is fully automated, and can be easily repeated with different subsets of the data.
Whereas this package focuses on the ESTC data, it utilizes additional tools from the more generic bibliographica and many other R packages. We are also working on similar tools for Finnish data collections, see Fennica.
Authors: Leo Lahti, Niko Ilomaki, Mikko Tolonen. Part of rOpenGov.
You are welcome to:
- submit suggestions and bug reports
- send a pull request (we will acknowledge contributions)
- join IRC at !ropengov@Freenode
- contact or follow us