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 Pretod's yearbook[1]. 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 1846on 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.

Data extraction from book

In the yearbook, there was two format for the data.

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 remaining jobs. We created for each year a text file containing informations about a specific job for a specific year. We rapidly got all our Data into tables. But some OCR errors still need to be corrected in order to have the possibility to get the geo coordinates of the adresses.

Adresses coordinates

In the middle of the XIX century, Paris changed in its inner structure. Some address would then change. It would have been difficult to query only a modern database (like the Geopy API) to get the coordinates of our adresses. But thankfully we got csv document from the DHLAB in order to get the coordinated of adresses that changed between then and now.

Maps

We selected an old map from paris from 1850 on the BNF website. This map was then georeferenced with the online tool Georeferencer. 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