In weeks 5 - 8, we are going to use Hypothesis as a platform to collaboratively explore the materials that you selected in week 3 for your adventure.

In order to do that, you need to prepare your materials. I am giving you two weeks to prepare for this. Consider the amount of work as being similar to what you would do for a very good seminar presentation.

Goals for this week

1. Read and think about your selected materials carefully
2. Prep them for the rest of us
3. Continue to improve your digital literacy

Listen

Episode 4 Script/Transcript

Do

The National Library of Scotland has made all kinds of materials available through what they call ‘The Data Foundry.’ They have made some Jupyter Notebooks to enable exploration and analysis of some of their holdings

1. Explore ‘A Medical History of British India’
2. Explore ‘Edinburgh Ladies’ Debating Society’
3. Log into your Github account. Copy these notebooks to your own Github repo by visiting the appropriate repo (ie, the NLS’ github repo), and then hit the ‘fork’ button. Copy the url; go to Binder and paste the url into the appropriate box, then hit launch. You now have your own copy in a live computational environment! Nb: any changes or data you put together while in the computational environment has to be downloaded to your local machine if you want to keep it.
4. Using the ‘Simple Scraper’ notebook, put together a dataset of materials from the Museum of History. Run it either locally or via Binder. (If you run the scraper using Binder, make sure to download the results to your own machine).
5. Go Further: try to build a new scraper from scratch on a webpage of your choice; this tutorial from Melanie Walsh’s class will walk you through that process. If you hit the rocket icon at the top of that tutorial, the page will launch in Binder and you can run/modify the code there.

As you explore, take care to note how the notebooks are structured. What lessons might we draw from these for the creation of our own notebooks? Make your observations in a journal entry, see below. Discuss in our discord space any points where there seems to be some tacit assumptions about what you know how to do, or where you need more information.

Think of it like this: at the end of this course you’ll be making a notebook on some aspect of Ottawa’s GLAM scene for the January 11th version of yourself. What does pastYou need to know?

Log your work

For your digital work, it is critical that you keep notes on what works, what doesn’t, what error messages you received, what help you received from others, what websites you went to, and so on.

Create a repository on Github; you can make it private. If you want anyone else to see a private repo, you have to add their username, remember.

Make a text file and call it journal.md. Put the date in it, write brief notes so that when you come back to all of this, you’ll know what you were doing.

Drag and drop this file, and any other supporting materials you wish, onto your repository; once they’ve uploaded, hit the ‘commit’ button.

DO NOT PUT images from the Museum into your repo (right? There could be serious permissions issues!)

While this isn’t graded, per se, you will need this material when it comes to writing the documentation for your eventual GLAM notebook you create. Get in the habit of keeping careful process notes.