POST: Paris Review Interviews and Wikipedia

Ed Summers (Library of Congress) has written a brief postĀ about playing with interviews from theĀ Paris Review andĀ 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 littleĀ crawlerĀ 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 aboutĀ JSON-LD, which became aW3C RecommendationĀ 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 onĀ dbpedia) usingĀ D3′s Force Layout.

dh+lib Review

This post was produced through a cooperation between Dana Bublitz, Elizabeth Lorang, Chella Vaidyanathan, Wendy Walker (Editors-at-large for the week), Roxanne Shirazi (Editor for the week), Sarah Potvin (Site Editor), and Zach Coble and Caro Pinto (dh+lib Review Editors).