Progress
We have finished cleaning and sorting the data for our twelve Zoobooks [that is a LOT of text, ~5,400 students worth], imported the csv files for each year into an ArcGIS map, and are currently working on accessibility, streamlining, and beautification. We have also reached out to the Admissions office in hopes of collaborating with them or discussing our findings and their relation to changes in Carleton’s outreach mission across this period.
Issues and Solutions
We had some trouble with poorly OCR’d text files ripped from the PDFs on the Carleton Archive, but we were able to brute-force our way through that issue and are still on track for production. Additionally, we have tentatively decided to drop the graph visualizations in favor of spending more time making the map readable and informative.
Resources used
To clean, fix, and format the raw data, we used a combination of Apple’s Automator program, OpenRefine, and Microsoft Excel. We then imported our newly readable csv files as individual layers on an ArcGIS map that will be our main visualization for the DH project.
Timeline
Sprint 1 (2/9 – 2/16): Catalog and convert geographic data for all 12 Zoobooks
Sprint 2 (2/17 – 2/21): Create interactive map with ArcGIS
Sprint 3 (2/22 – 2/25): Create narrative based on information from Archives/Admissions Office
Sprint 4 (2/26 – 3/2): Create and beautify WordPress site, populate with narrative & contents
Sprint 5 (3/2 – 3/6): Create and prepare presentation for 3/7
