2b:null 2c:["$","title",null,{"children":"Assignment 2: Exploratory Visualizations of the Sephardic Studies Collection | bcglee | Observable"}] 31:T128b,html`

Assignment 2: Exploratory Visualizations of the Sephardic Studies Collection

Benjamin Charles Germain Lee
bcgl@cs.washington.edu <\a>
UW ID: bcgl <\p>

In this assignment, I'll be exploring the University of Washington's Sephardic Studies Collection<\a>, which, as described on the linked website, is "one of the most expansive and fastest growing repositories of source materials pertaining to the Sephardic Jewish experience." Much of the collection is in Ladino<\a>, otherwise known as Judezmo or Judeo-Spanish, the language of the Sephardic Jewish people. Oftentimes, Jewish history is reduced to that of the Ashkenazi Jewish people. The mission of the Sephardic Studies Collection is to preserve the history of the Sephardic Jewish people and make books and other written works in Ladino available in digitized form online. As described on this page<\a>, "The Sephardic Studies Collection has gathered from members of the local Seattle Sephardic community more than 1,500 original Ladino books and thousands of documents composed in Ladino as well as other relevant languages, such as Ottoman Turkish, Hebrew and French. Dating between the 16th and mid-20th centuries, the books already comprise one of the largest Ladino libraries in the United States, with more volumes than the Library of Congress or Harvard University."

The digital collection contains about 150,000 pages of scanned material in Ladino, a remarkable statistic. So far, approximately 400 of the Ladino books have been digitized (if you are interested, you can view the books here<\a>). The dataset that I am visualizing consists of the metadata of these digitized books.

I must thank three people for their wonderful work and enthusiasm for making this collaboration possible:

Devin Naar, the Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies, Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. While I was the Digital Humanities Associate Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I had the pleasure to meet Professor Naar. We have been discussing the possibilities of pursuing a digital humanities project related to the Sephardic Studies Collection for about a year now, and this class has been the perfect opportunity for us to begin.
Ty Alhadeff, the Sephardic Studies Research Coordinator of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. Ty has been incredibly generous with his time in producing the dataset for this research.
Makena Mezistrano, Research Assistant, Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington.

The dataset includes the following fields (the annotations indicated with (*)s below were provided to me by Ty):

Title
Place of Publication
Latitude, longitude (I added these to the dataset by using geocoder's Python API)
Date of Publication
Language (only titles in which Ladino was either the sole or among the primary languages were included in this data set)^*<\sup>
Donor (the individual who donated/loaned the book)^*<\sup>
Category (this is not technically a Genre field, but rather a category field describes how we would organize the books on the UW Library website, which is more flexible in terms of categorization)^*<\sup>

I cleaned the dataset in Python using Pandas and used Basemap to make all of the map visualizations that appear at the end of this write-up.

The questions that I'm going to explore are:

How do the publications of Ladino books in the Sephardic Studies Collection vary in space and time, and can we understand these patterns through historical contextualization?
How do the genres of the books correlate with publication location and evolve with time?
Do we observe any patterns in the books contributed by different donors?

The next few lines are some imports for my code: `32:T6c5,vegalite({ "title": "Approximate Dates of Publication", "width": 750, "height": 400, "layer": [{ "data": {url: "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bcglee/0033977f60989184618643b1d7c2d546/raw/c9050efceb78f9c75c3cfdb3feab2807aa8af01a/sephardic_studies_dataset_geolocated.csv" }, "mark": "bar", "encoding": { "x": { "bin": false, "field": "Year", "type": "temporal", "timeUnit": "year", "sort": "ascending", "title":"Date of Publication", "scale": {"domain": [1600,2000]} }, "y": { "aggregate": "count", "type": "quantitative" } } }, { "mark": {"type":"rect", "opacity":0.5}, "data": { "values": [ { "start": "1914", "end": "1918", "event": "World War I" }, { "start": "1918", "end": "1922", "event": "Fall of Ottoman Empire" }, { "start": "1939", "end": "1945", "event": "World War II" } ], "format": { "parse": {"start": "date:'%Y'", "end": "date:'%Y'"} } }, "encoding": { "x": { "field": "start", "type": "temporal", "timeUnit": "year", "axis": null }, "x2": { "field": "end", "timeUnit": "year" }, "color": {"field": "event", "type": "nominal", "scale": {"scheme": "set2"}} } } ] })33:T444,html`

We see that there is a temporary decline in publishing during World War I, with a resurgence of publications directly after. One interesting thing to note is that 1918-1922 corresponds to the fall of the Ottoman Empire (usually considered the decline of Ladino publishing), as indicated in teal on the histogram. After this time, books continued to be published, though the number declined rapidly in the dataset. Another noteworthy feature is that publishing is nonexistent during World War II and then resumes in the late 1940's, which also aligns with our intuition. The lack of true resurgence after World War II can be attributed to the devastating effect of the Holocaust on the Sephardic Jewish community, as well as mass emigration (such as to Israel and the United States, where the adoption of Hebrew and English, respectively, took place en masse).

Let's turn now to a different dimension of the data: location. Let's get a sense of the distribution using another histogram (we'll turn to map visualizations in the second half of this write-up):

`34:T406,vegalite({ "title": "Histogram of publisher locations, stacked by donor", "width": 600, "height": 400, "data": {url: "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bcglee/0033977f60989184618643b1d7c2d546/raw/c9050efceb78f9c75c3cfdb3feab2807aa8af01a/sephardic_studies_dataset_geolocated.csv"}, "transform": [ {"filter": {"field":"Donor", "oneOf" : ["Richard Adatto", "Sephardic Bikur Holim", "Elazar Behar", "Al Maimon", "Rev. Morris Scharhon Collection"]}} ], "mark": "bar", "encoding": { "x": { "bin": false, "field": "Publisher Location", "axis": {"labelAngle": 300}, "type": "nominal", "sort": {"op":"count", "order":"descending"} }, "y": { "aggregate": "count", "type": "quantitative" }, "color": { "field": "Donor", "type": "nominal", // "scale": { // "domain": ["sun","fog","drizzle","rain","snow"], // "range": ["#e7ba52","#c7c7c7","#aec7e8","#1f77b4","#9467bd"] // }, "legend": {"title": "Donor"} } } })35:T442,vegalite({ data:{url: "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bcglee/0033977f60989184618643b1d7c2d546/raw/c9050efceb78f9c75c3cfdb3feab2807aa8af01a/sephardic_studies_dataset_geolocated.csv"}, "transform": [ {"filter": {"field":"Donor", "oneOf" : ["Richard Adatto", "Sephardic Bikur Holim", "Elazar Behar", "Al Maimon", "Rev. Morris Scharhon Collection"]}} ], "title":"Book Publication Date According to Donor", "width": 700, "height": 200, "mark": { "type": "circle", "opacity": 0.8, "stroke": "black", "strokeWidth": 1 }, "encoding": { "x": { "bin": { "binned": true, "step": 10 }, "field": "Year", "type": "quantitative", "axis": {"labelAngle": 0, "grid":true} }, "y": {"field": "Donor", "type": "nominal", "axis": {"title": "", "grid":true}}, "size": { "aggregate": "count", "type": "quantitative", "legend": {"title": "Number of Books", "clipHeight": 30}, "scale": {"range": [0, 1000]} }, "color": {"field": "Donor", "type": "nominal", "legend": null} } })36:T429,vegalite({ "title": "Histogram of book categories, stacked by publisher location", "width": 600, "height": 400, "data": {url: "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bcglee/d02fd79a2f3bd226e0c954c9ce1e44fe/raw/4529b548fce502c72a4b243d8aa625ef5c096c7a/sephardic_studies_dataset_categories.csv"}, "transform": [ {"filter": {"field":"Publisher Location", "oneOf" : ["Istanbul, Turkey", "Izmir, Turkey", "Salonica, Greece", "Vienna, Austria"]}} ], "mark": "bar", "encoding": { "x": { "bin": false, "field": "Website Category", "axis": {"labelAngle": 300}, "type": "nominal", "sort": {"op":"count", "order":"descending"}, "title": "Book category" }, "y": { "aggregate": "count", "type": "quantitative" }, "color": { "field": "Publisher Location", "type": "nominal", // "scale": { // "domain": ["sun","fog","drizzle","rain","snow"], // "range": ["#e7ba52","#c7c7c7","#aec7e8","#1f77b4","#9467bd"] // }, "scale": {"scheme": "paired"} } } })37:T41f,vegalite({ "title": "Histogram of book categories, stacked by donor", "width": 600, "height": 400, "data": {url: "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bcglee/d02fd79a2f3bd226e0c954c9ce1e44fe/raw/4529b548fce502c72a4b243d8aa625ef5c096c7a/sephardic_studies_dataset_categories.csv"}, "transform": [ {"filter": {"field":"Donor", "oneOf" : ["Richard Adatto", "Sephardic Bikur Holim", "Elazar Behar", "Al Maimon", "Rev. Morris Scharhon Collection"]}} ], "mark": "bar", "encoding": { "x": { "bin": false, "field": "Website Category", "axis": {"labelAngle": 300}, "type": "nominal", "sort": {"op":"count", "order":"descending"}, "title":"Book category" }, "y": { "aggregate": "count", "type": "quantitative" }, "color": { "field": "Donor", "type": "nominal", // "scale": { // "domain": ["sun","fog","drizzle","rain","snow"], // "range": ["#e7ba52","#c7c7c7","#aec7e8","#1f77b4","#9467bd"] // }, "legend": {"title": "Donor"} } } })38:T428,vegalite({ "title": "Histogram of book categories, stacked by publisher location", "width": 600, "height": 400, "data": {url: "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bcglee/d02fd79a2f3bd226e0c954c9ce1e44fe/raw/4529b548fce502c72a4b243d8aa625ef5c096c7a/sephardic_studies_dataset_categories.csv"}, "transform": [ {"filter": {"field":"Publisher Location", "oneOf" : ["Istanbul, Turkey", "Izmir, Turkey", "Salonica, Greece", "Vienna, Austria"]}} ], "mark": "bar", "encoding": { "x": { "bin": false, "field": "Website Category", "axis": {"labelAngle": 300}, "type": "nominal", "sort": {"op":"count", "order":"descending"}, "title": "Book category" }, "y": { "aggregate": "count", "type": "quantitative" }, "color": { "field": "Primary Languages", "type": "nominal", // "scale": { // "domain": ["sun","fog","drizzle","rain","snow"], // "range": ["#e7ba52","#c7c7c7","#aec7e8","#1f77b4","#9467bd"] // }, "scale": {"scheme": "paired"} } } })39:[] 2f:{"id":"0bf6ac27df8f062d","slug":null,"title":" Assignment 2: Exploratory Visualizations of the Sephardic Studies Collection ","thumbnail":"cceecbff32d47fec160cc6dc78f49c3c256456cdef28afe02590bccd1bd4f6bd","access_level":"public","create_time":"$D2019-08-19T19:42:55.167Z","update_time":"$D2019-08-19T19:42:55.167Z","view_time":null,"first_public_time":"$D2024-05-22T15:14:22.774Z","has_unpublished_edits":null,"fork":true,"stars":0,"starred":false,"owner":{"type":"team","id":"80bf7a5f003d4e21","login":"bcglee","name":"","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/cb802763c40db6c52f715f87bf8e9253ed5d3d7fdac6ed4e9a1be330f112b8a0","tier":"starter_2024"},"version":1271,"publish_version":null,"role":null,"authored":false,"authors":[{"type":"individual","id":"5fadaf0df147427d","login":"bcglee","name":"Ben","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/cb802763c40db6c52f715f87bf8e9253ed5d3d7fdac6ed4e9a1be330f112b8a0","tier":null}],"members":[{"type":"individual","id":"5fadaf0df147427d","login":"bcglee","name":"Ben","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/cb802763c40db6c52f715f87bf8e9253ed5d3d7fdac6ed4e9a1be330f112b8a0","tier":null,"role":"editor"},{"type":"team","id":"80bf7a5f003d4e21","login":"bcglee","name":"","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/cb802763c40db6c52f715f87bf8e9253ed5d3d7fdac6ed4e9a1be330f112b8a0","tier":"starter_2024","role":"viewer"}],"comments":[],"custom_thumbnail":false,"trashed":false,"lapsed":null,"subscribed":null,"forks":0,"collection":null,"type":"notebook","body":{"title":" Assignment 2: Exploratory Visualizations of the Sephardic Studies Collection ","cells":[{"id":105,"value":"$31","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":23,"value":"vegalite = require(\"@observablehq/vega-lite@0.1\")","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":70,"value":"d3 = require(\"d3@5\")","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":37,"value":"import {printTable} from '@uwdata/data-utilities'","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":276,"value":"html`\n

\nLet's start by getting a sense of the publication date range of the digitized books in the Sephardic Studies collection by creating a histogram of the dates of publication:\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":352,"value":"vegalite({\n \"title\": \"Approximate Dates of Publication\",\n \"width\": 800,\n \"height\": 400,\n \"layer\": [{\n \"data\": {url: \"https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bcglee/0033977f60989184618643b1d7c2d546/raw/c9050efceb78f9c75c3cfdb3feab2807aa8af01a/sephardic_studies_dataset_geolocated.csv\"\n },\n \"mark\": \"bar\",\n \"encoding\": {\n \"x\": {\n \"bin\": false,\n \"field\": \"Year\",\n \"type\": \"temporal\", \n \"timeUnit\": \"year\",\n \"sort\": \"ascending\",\n \"title\":\"Date of Publication\",\n \"scale\": {\"domain\": [1600,2000]}\n },\n \"y\": {\n \"aggregate\": \"count\",\n \"type\": \"quantitative\"\n }\n }\n }]\n})","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":1065,"value":"html`\n

\nWe notice a few interesting phenomena about the collection. First, there seems to be one book published around 1620, about a hundred years before any of the other books. I checked, and the date entry is correct; the book is a true outlier in the data. Second, the collection has a critical mass of books published around the turn of the 20th century. \n

\n\n

\nLet's now try to contextualize some of the finer-grained phenomena within broader historical events.\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":1050,"value":"$32","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":447,"value":"$33","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":26,"value":"vegalite({\n \"title\": \"Publication Locations\",\n \"width\": 600,\n \"height\": 400,\n data: {url: \"https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bcglee/0033977f60989184618643b1d7c2d546/raw/c9050efceb78f9c75c3cfdb3feab2807aa8af01a/sephardic_studies_dataset_geolocated.csv\"},\n \"mark\": \"bar\",\n \"encoding\": {\n \"x\": {\n \"bin\": false,\n \"field\": \"Publisher Location\",\n \"type\": \"nominal\",\n \"sort\": {\"op\":\"count\", \"order\":\"descending\"}\n },\n \"y\": {\n \"aggregate\": \"count\",\n \"type\": \"quantitative\"\n }\n }\n})","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":511,"value":"html`\n

\nI chose to sort the locations by count in descending order. Note that just shy of 20 data points have missing locations (indicated by \"Missing\" as a location field in the above plot), but overall, 95% of the books have associated publication locations, which is fantastic. We also note that two cities in Turkey, Istanbul and Izmir, are the most prevalent cities in the dataset. Next comes Salonica, Greece. Istanbul, Izmir, and Salonica make perfect sense, as the cities historically were homes to large populations of Sephardic Jews. Vienna is interesting, seeing as it is canonically associated with Western European Jews. Lastly, it's interesting to see some of the publication locations in the tail: Italy, Egypt, Bulgaria, USA, Romania, Hungary, Bosnia. The publishing locations are wonderfully diverse!\n

\n\n

\nLet's now take a look at the distribution of primary lanaguages.\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":1025,"value":"vegalite({\n \"title\": \"Primary Languages of Books\",\n \"width\": 600,\n \"height\": 400,\n data: {url: \"https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bcglee/0033977f60989184618643b1d7c2d546/raw/c9050efceb78f9c75c3cfdb3feab2807aa8af01a/sephardic_studies_dataset_geolocated.csv\"},\n \"mark\": \"bar\",\n \"encoding\": {\n \"x\": {\n \"bin\": false,\n \"field\": \"Primary Languages\",\n \"type\": \"nominal\",\n \"sort\": {\"op\":\"count\", \"order\":\"descending\"},\n \"axis\": {\"labelAngle\": 300}\n },\n \"y\": {\n \"aggregate\": \"count\",\n \"type\": \"quantitative\"\n }\n }\n})","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":1034,"value":"html`\n

\nWe know that the dataset was filtered to contain the books that contain Ladino as a primary langauge, so we are seeing the selection cut imprinted on the data. However, we do observe something interesting: the combination of Ladino with Hebrew accounts for about a quarter of the books in this dataset, but other language combinations are not very common: Ladino with French, Ladino with Judeo-Arabic, and Ladino with English and Yiddish. Yiddish makes sense, as it is the language of the Ashkenazi Jews, and French would have more likely been associated with Jews in Western Europe.\n

\nLet's now get a sense of how the books distribute across donor/contributor. \n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":86,"value":"vegalite({\n \"title\": \"Donor\",\n \"width\": 600,\n \"height\": 400,\n \"data\": {url: \"https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bcglee/0033977f60989184618643b1d7c2d546/raw/c9050efceb78f9c75c3cfdb3feab2807aa8af01a/sephardic_studies_dataset_geolocated.csv\"},\n \"mark\": \"bar\",\n \"encoding\": {\n \"x\": {\n \"bin\": false,\n \"field\": \"Donor\",\n \"axis\": {\"labelAngle\": 300},\n \"type\": \"nominal\",\n \"sort\": {\"op\":\"count\", \"order\":\"descending\"}\n },\n \"y\": {\n \"aggregate\": \"count\",\n \"type\": \"quantitative\"\n }\n }\n})","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":533,"value":"html`\n

\nSorting by count, we can see that this is a very heavy-tailed distribution, and two donors are responsible for about half of the books in the collection. Let's go ahead and create a stacked histogram of location according to the donors who donated at least 20 books (i.e., the top five donors).\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":906,"value":"$34","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":582,"value":"html`\n

\nBy breaking the histogram of publication locations down by donor, we see that Istanbul, Izmir, Salonica, and Vienna are consistent publication locations across the top 5 donors. We also see that Richard Adatto's collection is exclusively responsible for the long tail of publication locations. It's also nice to know that the missing locations are roughly evenly spread across the donors. \n

\nLet's now get a sense of the how the books distribute accross publication date for the top 5 donors. We can do this using a bubble plot, binned by decade:\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":484,"value":"$35","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":589,"value":"html`\n

\nI chose a bubble plot here because it's a great way of comparing temporal data for the different donors.\nIt's interesting to note that the top 5 donors all seem to have similar distributions for publication location. The books contributed by the Sephardic Bikur Holim seem to have a slight overdensity of books published between 1920-1930. Perhaps this is due to collecting a specific category of books. Let's use this thought as an opportunity to start exploring book category.

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":769,"value":"vegalite({\n \"title\": \"Book category, as indicated on Sephardic Studies website\",\n \"width\": 600,\n \"height\": 400,\n \"data\": {url: \"https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bcglee/d02fd79a2f3bd226e0c954c9ce1e44fe/raw/4529b548fce502c72a4b243d8aa625ef5c096c7a/sephardic_studies_dataset_categories.csv\"},\n \"mark\": \"bar\",\n \"encoding\": {\n \"x\": {\n \"bin\": false,\n \"field\": \"Website Category\",\n \"axis\": {\"labelAngle\": 300},\n \"type\": \"nominal\",\n \"sort\": {\"op\":\"count\", \"order\":\"descending\"},\n \"title\": \"Book category\"\n },\n \"y\": {\n \"aggregate\": \"count\",\n \"type\": \"quantitative\"\n }\n }\n})","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":835,"value":"html`\n

\nThis is pretty cool! By looking at the histogram of book types, we now have a sense of the contents of the books. There seem to be two large categories: novels and materials pertaining to Judaism (these are spread across \"Biblical Commentaries and Rabbinic Literature,\" \"Holidays,\" \"Prayer Books,\" and \"Bibles\"). \n

\n\n

\nNow, one could imagine that book category may vary according to publication location. Let's go ahead and make a stacked histogram for the top four publisher locations and start to address the third question that I posed for my exploratory analysis: \n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":839,"value":"$36","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":843,"value":"html`\n

\nI picked a different color scheme than the one used in the previous stacked histogram in order to indicate that the layered field is different (here, location instead of donor). It's worth keeping in mind that Prayer Books and Holidays appear to have similar distributions because many (but not all) of the books were tagged as both. However, from this histogram, one thing immediately jumps out: we see that many of the prayer books and holiday books were published in Vienna. This is really interesting! If we make the assumption that the Sephardic Studies Collection is representative of the landscape of Ladino publishing, this leads us to believe that Vienna was actually a hub for holiday/prayer books in Ladino. Who would have guessed! \n

\n\n

\nNow, let's take a look at a histogram of book category broken down according to the donors who have donated at least 20 books:\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":877,"value":"$37","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":885,"value":"html`\n

\nThis stacked histogram helps to address my second question, regarding the types of books that each donor had contributed. Richard Adatto contributed most of the biblical commentaries and rabbinic literature, and Sephardic Bikur Holim contributed a relatively large fraction of novels. However, we see that none of these donors had books of exclusively one or two categories. \n

\n\n

\nNow, let's take a look at a bubble plot showing the publication dates of books of various types over time, binned by decade:\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":787,"value":"vegalite({\n data:{url: \"https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bcglee/d02fd79a2f3bd226e0c954c9ce1e44fe/raw/4529b548fce502c72a4b243d8aa625ef5c096c7a/sephardic_studies_dataset_categories.csv\"},\n \"title\":\"Book Publication Date According to Category\",\n \"width\": 700,\n \"height\": 300,\n \"mark\": {\n \"type\": \"circle\",\n \"opacity\": 0.8,\n \"stroke\": \"black\",\n \"strokeWidth\": 1\n },\n \"encoding\": {\n \"x\": {\n \"bin\": {\n \"binned\": true,\n \"step\": 10\n },\n \"field\": \"Year\",\n \"type\": \"quantitative\",\n \"axis\": {\"labelAngle\": 0,\"grid\":true}\n },\n \"y\": {\"field\": \"Website Category\", \n \"type\": \"nominal\", \n \"axis\": {\"title\":\"\", \"labelAngle\": -30, \"grid\":true}},\n \"size\": {\n \"aggregate\": \"count\",\n \"type\": \"quantitative\",\n \"legend\": {\"title\": \"Number of Books\", \"clipHeight\": 30},\n \"scale\": {\"range\": [0, 1000]},\n },\n \"color\": {\"field\": \"Website Category\", \"type\": \"nominal\", \"legend\": null}\n }\n})","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":923,"value":"html`\n

\nIn this bubble plot, one phenomenon jumps out at me: many of the novels seem to have been published in the early 20th century. We saw this information to a certain extent encoded in other plots, having already observed that a lot of books contributed by Richard Adatto were published in the early 20th century and that Richard Adatto contributed a high fraction of the novels. However, it's nice to see this shown explicitly. I am curious to know if this trend generalizes to all of Ladino publishing. If so, one could draw interesting conclusions from the fact that the books pertaining to religion were published at a relatively constant rate from 1800 onward, whereas the novels increased in popularity around 1900.\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":719,"value":"html`\n

\nNow, let's look at some map visualizations to bring the previous histograms involving location to life. Note: I made all of these visualizations using basemap in Python. Let's start with a map visualization of publication location, where the size of the circle is proportional to the number of books published in the corresponding city:\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":1014,"value":"html`\n $\"all\"$ \n`\n//https://drive.google.com/open?id=1rV1PxIUioaK8MMycmEAlbFE_OcP1U0P8\n","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":723,"value":"html`\n

\nI chose to omit location names on top of the circles because the names became quite cluttered. Though this plot encodes much of the same information as the first histogram that I presented, it gives us a better sense of the Ladino publishing ecosystem represented in the Sephardic Studies dataset because we can see the locations on a map. Note that the tiny dot that seems to be floating over the water near Turkey is actually Rhodes (not a data error). I decided to omit the cities of Seattle and New York (homes to publishers of a few Ladino books) because of scaling considerations with the map: I wanted to be able to show the area of activity with as much resolution as possible. In this plot, we see the geographic proximity of Istanbul, Izmir, and Salonica, the 3 most prevalent publication locations in this dataset. \n\nNext, let's look at the same map visualization, except this time with small multiples, in the form of time slices of every 50 years starting in 1750:\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":1005,"value":"html`\n $\"timeslices\"$ \n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":1003,"value":"html`\n

\nIn the series of timeslices, it's interesting to see that Istanbul, Izmir, Salonica, and Vienna are all consistent publishing locations from 1800 onward. In the timeslice 1850-1900, Vienna is featured prominently as a publication location. Post-1900, Istanbul is the most prominent location of publication. One country shows significant growth starting in 1850: (what would become) Israel. This, of course, corresponds with the rise of Zionism. \n

\n\n

\nFor my last map visualization, I'll show a similar map visualization in the form of small multiples, except this time, I have broken the maps down by category. This is similar to the stacked histogram shown earlier, but I was curious to see if any additional insights could be gleaned by situating the category divisions on an actual map.\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":1126,"value":"html`\n $\"categoryslices\"$ `","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":1046,"value":"html`\n

\nIn this small multiples map visualization of book categories, we observe that novels are the predominant category of books published in Israel. We note here (as noted earlier) that prayer/holiday books appear to have similar distributions because many (but not all) of the books were tagged as both. It is evident that prayer/holiday books are the most common categories that were published in Italy (Livorno), which is interesting because it parallels with the earlier observation that Vienna was a surprisingly prevalent publication location for prayer/holiday books. I imagine that there may be an interesting insight to be made about the importance of Western European publishers for these categories of books. \n

\n\n

\nLet's make one last small multiples map visualization of primary languages to see if there is any difference between \"Ladino\" and \"Ladino and Hebrew\" that manifests geographically:\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":1197,"value":"html`\n $\"languages\"$ \n` ","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":1204,"value":"html`\n

\nHere, I've filtered out the very small number of books that are in English, French, and Yiddish.\nThe feature that jumped out most to me is that there seems to be an overabundance of books with the primary languages of Ladino and Hebrew being published out of Vienna. This may be well-correlated with the fact that Vienna is the location of publication for a large fraction of prayer/holiday books. We can check this with one last histogram of category stacked by primary language:\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":1210,"value":"$38","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":1223,"value":"html`\n

\nThis stacked histogram confirms the hypothesis that a higher fraction of prayer/holiday books are in Ladino and Hebrew. Indeed, according to primary languages, we see an interesting split of the categories into religious (Biblical Commentaries and Rabbinic Literature, Bibles, Prayer Books, Holidays) and non-religious (Novels, History, Education, Sephardic Community Documents, Plays and Theater, Songs and Poetry).\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":1145,"value":"html`\n Conclusions \n\n

\nIn this assignment, I've explored the digitized Ladino books in the Sephardic Studies Collection at the University of Washington through the lens of a few analysis questions. In addition to observing phenomena that align with intuition (the growth of publishing in Israel in the 20th century, the surpression of publications during the World Wars), I have also discovered some interesting phenomena that I wouldn't have guessed: Vienna was one of the leading publication locations in the second half of the 19th century, having published many prayer/holiday books; many of the novels were published around the turn of the 20th century. Lastly, the donors who contributed the most Ladino books each were in possession of a wide range of books, both in terms of category and publication date. Again, I'd like to thank Devin Naar, Ty Alhadeff, and Makena Mezistrano for making this project possible!\n

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"}],"files":"$W39","stdlib":"1","titling":"auto"}} 30:"$2f:body"