Quartiers Livres / Booking Paris

General aim of the project

This project aim to present the different neighbourhoods where people in the book industry where located in the middle of the XIX century. Starting from Pretod's yearbook of Paris typographers, an interactive map has been created in order to visualise the different places where workshops, bookshops etc. were located in the years 1840.

Data Presentation

Original sources from BnF

Our primary source for this work is the yearbook. We analyse the issues that were edited between 1844 and 1847. In the book are present the names and the address of different type of business related to book.

Our second main source, is a Paris map from 1846 found on the BnF website. We decided to choose that one because it was the most recent map in the first sampling we did. Which we thought would be the best solution to superpose with a recent mapping service.

Project process description

Extraction

Our books had already been "OCRized", and were available as text files for download. The quality of the OCR seemed to be good enough to begin with the extraction of the information. The text we kept for analysis contained only two distinct form of layout / structure, one for the printers and one for all the other jobs. For each year, we created a single file for every job. Even after long checks, we had a different number of files per year. With regular expression, it was possible to split between the names and the adresses of the people of the yearbook. The first specificity of the formats, where from the printer data part. In addition to the name of the place, the name of the "prote" also appeared if there was one. The second was the inconsistent presence of specific descriptions about was was printed in the place or general informations. We also stored all this inconsistent data. For data quality reason and clarity reasons we decided to only use the NAME and ADRESS field. We rapidly got all our Data into tables.

Adresses coordinates

During the middle of the XIX century, Paris changed in its inner structure. Some address would then change between now and then. Due to this, the use of tool like GeoPy. But thankfully we got a CSV document from the DHLAB in order to get the coordinated of adresses of the street names that we extracted from the yearbook. But, as the performance was really low, we decided to opt for the google option.

Maps

We selected an old map from paris from 1850 on the BNF website. This map was then georeferenced with the online tool [1]. This map will be used to place all our adress points on our final project website.

Web Application

Prototypes

During the first week we designed some mockups with Balsamiq tool. The prototype focused on the map inclusion and including libraries and more modern book relatd places.

Developpement

We will use a python framework to create the application. As we are not familiar with web development we began early a hands on, on the language.

Project calendar

Deadline	Focus
25.11	Mapping a minimal set of data
2.12	Prototype of web application, Database ready from Annuaire Pretod, Getting descriptions ready for the map, Extract sizes of printers workshop
9.12	Implementation of search result and visualisation of book neighboorhood in the city Adding data from publishers from Bnf
16.12	Improvement of UI and final app design