Reflecting on the semester, I believe I have progressed significantly. I now know where to start when employing computational methods. Before, I would have been totally lost. I have also made good progress with the computational skills themselves. I feel comfortable with markdown. I feel I can use regular expressions...

After cleaning the journal in the last post, it was time to organize the journal further and make tabular data from it. I decided to aim for a simple final product: isolating individual articles into rows. The data in each row would be separated by tabs to create a TSV...

Part of my source base is comprised of the Journal de Médecine Militaire. First published in 1781, this journal was the brainchild of Jacques de Horne, a miltiary doctor who also served as physician to members of the royal family. The journal saw seven volumes with the last coming in...

When studying any healthcare system, fundamental questions to ask are: how large is the system and how effective is the system? With the help of a unique archival source and two visualizations derived from it, I hope to answer these two questions for France’s military-medical system at the outset of...

Plan for the Rest of the Semester

The last two weeks have been difficult from a conceptual point of view. I have been trying to determine how this website and computational methods in general can best serve my career, whether inside or outside academia. If I stay inside academia,...

Step One:

Learning Wikidata

First, I looked for the Wikipedia page for a prominent French military surgeon who served primarily during the Napoleonic Wars: Dominique Jean Larrey. From there, I explored his Wikidata page and familirized myself with Items, Labels and statements.

Step Two:

Downloading Data

Texts

Reference: I selected military medical journals published in the mid to late 18th century to serve as my reference body of texts. The first of these jounrals,Journal de medecine militaire first published in 1781, was the brainchild of Jacques de Horne, a miltiary doctor who also served as...