What We Learned from Thousands of Goodreads Reviews February 12, 2020February 12, 2020 jshanahan Leave a comment This post is by student researchers Emma and Chris: If you’ve ever combed through Goodreads, you may have noticed the range of ratings and reviews on the site. While some books may receive thousands of comments, others only gather a hundred (or less). You might also wonder have much disparity there is in ratings for any single book. We wanted to know what Goodreads reviewers said about some of the “One Book One Chicago” books we’re studying as part of the Reading Chicago Reading project. Comments on Goodreads can, of course, come from anywhere in the world. But did Chicago’s choice of these books … Read more
What do CPL branch libraries have in common? February 12, 2019February 12, 2019 jshanahan Leave a comment As we finish our omnibus white paper on the project, some maps and visualizations have been augmented to include the latest book seasons and recolored to show the branch clusters and checkouts per book. We’ve also excerpted some of the explanation. In order to create Figure C, we performed unsupervised clustering of the branches based on their demographic characteristics. We used the Partitioning Around Medioids (PAM) algorithm [Kaufman 1990], which is known to be more robust to noise and outliers compared to the more widely-used k-means algorithm. PAM is more computationally-intensive… Read more
Presentation at the Lyrasis Summit December 27, 2018December 27, 2018 jshanahan Leave a comment It was exciting to present an overview of the project at the Lyrasis Summit, and video has been posted. You cannot see the slides I am speaking about, but we’re happy to send them to anyone who is interested. … Read more
Presentations at DHCS 2018 November 23, 2018November 23, 2018 jshanahan Leave a comment “Reading Chicago Reading” researchers presented on recent work at the 9th Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, hosted by Loyola University Chicago. … Read more