POST: Paris Review Interviews and Wikipedia

Ed Summers (Library of Congress) has written a brief post about playing with interviews from the Paris Review and Wikipedia articles, and his attempts to use JSON-LD and D3 for network visualization. His post is a great example of the way that a passing interest in something can be an entry into new technology skills. It also demonstrates how experimentation with simple scripts and new tools can produce tangible results (his post includes a list of the 40 interviews that haven’t yet been linked to Wikipedia, for any enterprising Wikipedians out there). Summers notes,

I wanted to get a picture not only of what Wikipedia articles pointed at the Paris Review, but also Paris Review interviews which were not referenced in Wikipedia. So I wrote a little crawler that collected all the Paris Review interviews, and then figured out which ones were pointed at by English Wikipedia.

This was also an excuse to learn about JSON-LD, which became aW3C Recommendation a few weeks ago. I wanted to use JSON-LD to serialize the results of my crawling as an RDF graph so I could visualize the connections between authors, their interviews, and each other (via influence links that can be found on dbpedia) using D3′s Force Layout.