The Guardian 1,000 Books Electronically Tagged¶

Conventions¶

The convention for about tags that I’ve used is the one described in this previous posting. For what it’s worth, I’m warming to this convention, not least because (unlike the ISBN) if you know the title and author of the book, it is fairly trivial to construct the almost-always unique about tag. The python library used to generate the about tags is available at github.

Finding books in this list is fairly easy if you have any kind of access to FluidDB. Using fdb, there are various options:

• Finding specifically books in the Guardian 1,000, simply look for objects with a miro/books/guardian-1000 tag set to True.

  $ fdb count -q 'has miro/books/guardian-1000'
  1000 objects matched
  Total: 1000 objects

• More generally, to find books in the books table published, look for objects with (for example) a miro/books/title tag. At the moment, this is the same set, since I haven’t added anything else; but I will!

  $ fdb count -q 'has miro/books/author'
  1000 objects matched
  Total: 1000 objects

• To find a specific book, you can obviously query the title, the author, both or use the about tag; because of the normalization on the about tag, that will often be the easiest and most reliable way of retrieving a particular book. Here, for example, are two queries, all of which find (inter alia) Zola’s La Bête Humaine:

  $ fdb show -a 'book:la bete humaine (emile zola)' /about /miro/books/title /miro/books/author
  Object with about="book:la bete humaine (emile zola)":
    /fluiddb/about = "book:la bete humaine (emile zola)"
    /miro/books/title = "La Bête Humaine"
    /miro/books/author = "Émile Zola"
  $ fdb show -q 'miro/books/title="La Bête Humaine"' \
          /about /miro/books/title /miro/books/author
  1 object matched
  Object 58560935-d600-4921-a7d4-389e7bd068b5:
    /fluiddb/about = "book:la bete humaine (emile zola)"
    /miro/books/title = "La Bête Humaine"
    /miro/books/author = "Émile Zola"
  $ fdb show -q 'miro/books/surname="Zola"' /about /miro/books/title /miro/books/author
  4 objects matched
  Object 58560935-d600-4921-a7d4-389e7bd068b5:
    /fluiddb/about = "book:la bete humaine (emile zola)"
    /miro/books/title = "La Bête Humaine"
    /miro/books/author = "Émile Zola"
  Object 49cee61c-85e2-4bce-9380-0c07dc58dc86:
    /fluiddb/about = "book:the debacle (emile zola)"
    /miro/books/title = "The Debacle"
    /miro/books/author = "Émile Zola"
  Object 57590e71-beff-4fab-9a4c-b23b9574dbb3:
    /fluiddb/about = "book:germinal (emile zola)"
    /miro/books/title = "Germinal"
    /miro/books/author = "Émile Zola"
  Object c5bba025-9c4a-4c3b-81df-1b7e1bed4653:
    /fluiddb/about = "book:therese raquin (emile zola)"
    /miro/books/title = "Therese Raquin"
    /miro/books/author = "Émile Zola"

The Table Structure¶

Like the elements from the periodic table and the planets datasets that I published previously, this dataset was published as a table straight from Miró. Unlike those datasets though, I haven’t added any record numbers, about-tag links or id links, as it seems to me that record order is completely immaterial here and I expect to update the books dataset regularly. (I’ll probably add the Orange Prize winners next, and perhaps booker winners; adding the Orange Prize winners will at least get Anne Michaels in.)

Other Notes¶

The raw data was scraped from the Guardian websites at the time of publication, as described here though they have more recently produced a definitive list themselves. I corrected a few errors, but largely the data is just as it appeared at the time.

In compiling this list, I have converted the publication year into a number, i.e. the miro/books/year tag is numeric. This required me to decide on an approach for the small number of cases in which the Guardian-supplied year was actually a range of dates; I simply took the earliest year, which obviously leads to a small loss of information. The 25 records affected were:

Happy tagging!