Emily Elmore

This project was really exciting, and, despite the limitations of the latter half of the semester, a fulfilling learning experience. Although the library component of the project was cut short, surveying books for interventions was probably my favorite part of the project. I had little experience working with data visualizations prior to this project, and even less experience with building a website. The data sets we worked with provided a means of exploring how different tools and programs manipulate the data to create interesting and fun visualizations. Each week at our teem meetings we shared what we had been working on, explaining the different tools and methods we respectively chose to utilize. I found that PivotCharts in excel worked well to demonstrate the basic intervention data, and I used Voyant to show more specified language data from the data set. My favorite intervention I found during the surveying process was this card stuck into a copy of Palestine and Syria: with the chief routes through Mesopotamia and Babylonia; handbook for travellers, published by Karl Baedeker. 

Catherine Lin

My experience collecting and visualizing data for the Mawrginalia project changed the way I thought about books and libraries. It was novel initially even to touch the books. They had different bindings, paper texture, and marbled patterns that were very different from current books. The bookplates provided some immediate information about the provenance of the books. While some of them named recognizable figures from Bryn Mawr’s history, such as Mary Garrett, or Lucy Donnelly, a Bryn Mawr graduate who became an English professor, others were more obscure. Looking at the library cards tucked into the back cover, it was cool to note that people from the 1970s were sometimes interacting with the books. Though it was likely not pre-1923, my favorite intervention was the word “Phooey!” written in the margin. While visualizing the data, the limited amount of positive data in each category makes it difficult to determine whether each variable has a causal relationship. However, I had not previously thought about library metadata and how it distinguishes between, for example, authors of the same name, or authors who use many different pseudonyms. Thinking about marginalia made me realize that people’s relationships with books and how they interact with books have changed a lot over time for both technological and social reasons, a history that would be interesting to explore further.