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ropensci / unconf17

Website for 2017 rOpenSci Unconf
http://unconf17.ropensci.org
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Creating a Data Package of Historical Correspondance #79

Open jimhester opened 7 years ago

jimhester commented 7 years ago

@earino I believe recommended the Fall of Rome podcast on twitter (the tweet has since been deleted). In one of the episodes the the host Patrick Wyman discusses a dataset of ~3000 letters sent to and from various figures in the late roman empire that he compiled as part of his dissertation. When I heard this I thought it would be a cool example dataset and a good candidate for an R data package.

Unfortunately the dataset is not publicly available, however there is another similar and larger dataset / project called the Republic of Letters mentioned in the dissertation that contains a database on letters from Scientists in the 17th and 18th centuries.

There are a number of different datasets available from the Republic of Letters project, one that looks like it could be a good candidate for a data package is a dataset of Voltaire's correspondants http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/publications/voltaire/.

sckott commented 7 years ago

cc @lmullen

lmullen commented 7 years ago

Hi all. I agree that this is something that would be worth doing, and the Republic of Letters project would be a good candidate. (It's a long standing project, but they just published a series of articles in the American Historical Review, which is roughly like publishing in Nature or Science or the like.)

If you would be willing, then the historydata package, already a part of rOpenSci would be a good home for this dataset, I think. I'm planning an expansion of the package this summer, and I'm gathering suggestions here.

jimhester commented 7 years ago

Just a small update, Patrick Wyman sent me the uncleaned spreadsheet for the letters dataset at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sNO1W9R54VaqxPTAgxbtuyqSMz9XMIeJQiyDeAerG2E/edit?usp=sharing. So if anyone wants to work on a small data package including cleaning data it would be a good candidate.

daranzolin commented 7 years ago

Semi-related: the Perseus Digital Library has a wealth of ancient primary texts and I've started a package for getting them here.

daranzolin commented 7 years ago

I'd love to contribute to this project! Is the content of the letters separate?