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Dewey friend wheel

18th November 2008

Dewey friend wheel

posted in misc |

I've been meaning to have a stab at creating something similar to a friend wheel, but using library data, for a while now. Here's a prototype which uses our "people who borrowed this, also borrowed…" data to try find strong borrowing relationships…

Dewey friends

I picked three random Dewey numbers and hacked together a quick PerlMagick script to draw the wheel:

  • 169 - Logic -> Analogy (orange)
  • 822 - English & Old English literatures -> Drama (purple)
  • 941 - General history of Europe -> British Isles (light blue)

The thickness and brightness of the line indicates the strength of the relationship between the two classifications. For example, for people who borrowed items from 941, we also see heavy borrowing in the 260's (Christian social theology), 270's (Christian church history), and the 320's (Political science).

The next step will be to churn through all of the thousand Dewey numbers and draw a relationship wheel for our entire book stock. I've left my work PC on to crunch through the raw data overnight, so hopefully I'll be able to post the image tomorrow.

There is currently one response to “Dewey friend wheel”

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  1. 1 On November 18th, 2008, Dave Pattern said:

    Fitting up to a thousand Dewey numbers on the circumference of a circle isn't easy, so you'll need to look at the full sized image to read the classifications.

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