A bit of a cross-post, but I assume there are plenty of people who read this site who don’t follow The Diary of Samuel Pepys closely, but still might be interested. Hello geeks! I’ve just made loads of the data behind the site available in JSON format, in the hope some people feel like exploring it.
Here’s a list of roughly what’s included:
The text of more than 3,000 diary entries, including footnotes and links to relevant Encyclopedia pages.
A list of the categories used in the Encyclopedia, with their structure.
All the data about the more than 4,000 topics in the Encyclopedia: names, descriptions, Wikipedia links, latitude/longitude, shapes, categories, etc.
More than 300 thumbnail images of people included in the Encyclopedia.
There’s a lot more information about the data in the long README file, which is also included in the 6MB zip archive of the data.
I’d love to see some interesting, beautiful and/or fun things done with this. We already have basic maps of places and graphs of how often each topic appears in the diary. And Matthew Somerville’s recent Pepys’ Shows site used an early release of some of the data.
There must be more that can be done with all this historic data though. If you have any ideas, let me know, or just plough straight in. And if there’s anything more that would be useful, get in touch.
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