Media Arts and Technology

"[...] When the chips are down."

After a tragedy occurs, where do we seek answers?
Philosophy, science, religion, history?
This brief study explores four major US-related incidents and its immediate reaction based on items checked out per topic. This same data is then compared to a more 'peaceful' period of that same year.

Three main Dewey classes are searched:

• 100 :: Philosophy
  200 :: Religion
  900 :: History

Since these categories can be too general, these additional (more specific) sub-classes were also included in the query:

• 297 - Religion - Islam
  956 - History of Asia - Middle East

Seattle Library's Most Controversial:

Mainstream is boring! Is it possible to use the information in the library database to determine which items are the most controversial? Can we implicitly discover which books or DVDs are strongly loved by few, but detested by many? Is it possible to discover subcultures and gauge people's varying passion for different topics?

I attempt to quantify the above concept by examining variations in durations of checkout, popularity, and page length to determine a 'controversy score' for each item. Then, we can plot which subjects are the most controversial, and by inspecting individual item names we can discover which items have the highest variance of interest, and are thus the most titillating items in the library.

It's The Economy, Stupid!

Eventually leading into the great recession that still shapes our economy today, the 2007-2008 financial crisis was the macroeconomic event of the first decade of the 21st century. For this first assignment, I am looking at possible effects of this historic bust on the choice of books borrowed by the patrons of the Seattle public library system. Specifically, I am asking if there is a visible increase in interest in understanding the mechanisms of capitalism around the peak of the crisis.

Project 1: Forgotten Books

Project Description:

Every library needs to face an awkward situation that many books have been kept by audience way later than they are supposed to be. Can we just simply assume that’s because of people’s bad memory? Is it possible that there is a deeper connection between the types of books and their delayed returned date? Can we find a reasonable explanation for this phenomenon? In this project, the books which have been checked out for more than 3 years will be examined to see if any interesting patterns will be found.

Please see the attached PDF for queries and analysis. Links to CSV: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/f01vdw4hmse6 ... x53Xa?dl=0

Looking beyond the collection as a series of data points and instead an entity marked by presence and absence, what these absences mean, and how an abstract concept can be represented visually.

While doing research on different categories of the Dewey Decimal System, I found a small list of
sections, which specifically deal with women and their relation to a given field. (http://ndscs.nodak.libguides.com/conten ... sid=681502) I chose to investigate this significance by analyzing the percentage of specifically female works as part of their larger parent branch, and how this changes over time. To this end, I list the total number of checked out items per month of both the female and general categories, and the female category percentage.

Exploring late return rate

According to the Seattle Public Library (SPL) policies an item that is checked-out can be returned based on the following schedule:

• Books, magazines, pamphlets, CDs, audiocassettes, albums, videocassettes: 21 days
  DVDs: 14 Days

After identifying all items that are returned after their due date (via the difference of check-in and check-out dates), it would be interesting to explore the following aspects:

• - Whether there is a specific month of the year with more items returned late.
  - What types of items people tend to return late.
  - Is there any specific branch with this behaviour?
  - What kind of subjects are more likely to be returned late.

For this project I will use MySQL for querying the SPL database and R (http://www.r-project.org) as interface to be able to make statistical analysis of the queried information.

Are certain types of books more read during rainy, cloudy days?

The dataset of the Seattle Public Library offers an opportunity to verify if dark and rainy nights and days, the common scenario of Gothic books' trama, are also prefered by the public while reading these books. Most interestingly, Seattle is known as one of the most rainy capitals of the United State, among the top five cities with more cloudy days – an average of 226 per year. The months when Seattle gets more rain are between October and March.

Here we are attempting to measure the amount of books about Texas (in general) that are related to the topics of Geography and History. Then we look at the months in which the books are checked out in hopes of seeing a seasonal pattern for planning of travel.