Here are my assignments for this week!
API Webscraping Geocoding Gender Inference
I found all of these exercises to be really interesting concepts about coding. When I tried to go in and complete the functions and write the commands(?) though, I realized half of the problem was the fact that I misspelled a word. I kept writing “csv” as “cvs,” like the drugstore, and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. This may sound silly but the one concept I really struggled with was creating/opening files. For the Gender Inference assignment I didn’t realize that the file I was trying to create didn’t match up with the csv file I downloaded to the notebook. I had to go back in and change the name of the file in my uploads to match the file I created in my notebook.
Something that can be useful for me in my own research is the data stripping tool to wipe away information that I don’t need when looking at large datasets like census records or newspapers. Along with that, the gender inferencing tool would also help when looking at immigration records from the early nineteenth century. Having a tool to better track the gender identities of nineteenth-century immigrants coming to the United States might make it easier to refer to immigrants properly without misgendering them (that’s hoping the gender inferencing tool works). It would also help me better understand the effects of specific exclusionary laws that targeted Chinese women in the nineteenth century.
In all honesty, the Chronicling America website has a ton of old digitized newspapers that are surprisingly readable. I was flipping through the site earlier and found a useful article (linked above) that detailed the political, social, and economic gripes California Democrats had with Chinese immigrants in 1869; the type of article I’ve been hoping to get my hands on. Typically, these newspapers are not in very good condition, but this one and others in the set were scanned almost perfectly.
This is also what my face looked like after completing the assignments. The blue light glasses are obviously not working out for these eyeballs.
One reply on “Module 4 Assignment”
Minor typo in the API notebook: You’ve got an extra underscore on place_of_publication here
that will keep your code from running. Otherwise the assignments look good.
And yes! Chronicling America has very good scans. It’s a great resource for both close reading and digital analysis. I don’t believe you can get the full text of articles via the API, but you can search for terms in the text using the API and use that to filter what you look for.