LibraryCheckouts/introduction.html at main · broyce24/LibraryCheckouts · GitHub

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<h1> Introduction </h1>
<h3> <em>John Harrison | Lauren Nguyen | Ben Royce | Jake Seaberg </em> </h3>
<img src="https://img.freepik.com/free-vector/female-smiling-librarian-standing-counter-book-shelf-paper-flat-vector-illustration-city-library-knowledge_74855-8364.jpg?w=1480&t=st=1654121970~exp=1654122570~hmac=165cf436d9c86255d3cce9dd8aa5912453a59107a06ba4bc878d80c3948779e4" style="width:700px;height:500px;"/>

<p>As we move further past 2020, it’s difficult to sift through the haze to grasp any specifics of those months in isolation. Between baking our fiftieth loaf of bread, protesting for social justice and watching the news cycle in dread, the whole year mushes together and the lines between our perspectives and those of the rest of the world are blurred. When we were locked inside for a year and a half, it’s safe to say that the media we consumed started to define us; what if we could paint a picture of a population’s beliefs, interests and fears based on something as simple as checkouts from a library? We hope to touch on this question at the level of the city of Seattle, using public checkout data from the Seattle Public Library to get a grasp on what was actually on the city’s mind during lockdown.</p>

<h2> Questions </h2>
<p> Our guiding question is, "How did the interests of Seattle residents shift throughout the year 2020?" To address this question, we have broken our topic down into 3 questions that can be answered with our interactive charts.</p>

<p>1. How did library checkout formats differ as the pandemic continued? <br>
2. What were the most popular titles in 2020, excluding classic literature? <br>
3. What were the most popular genres checked out in each month of 2020, and do the subgenres of materials being checked out indicate any reflection of current events at the time?</p>

<h2> The Dataset </h2>
<p> Our data comes straight from Seattle Open Data and was collected by the City of Seattle and can be found<a href="https://data.seattle.gov/Community/Checkouts-by-Title/tmmm-ytt6"> here.</a> Whenever a book is checked out at one of the Seattle Public Library locations, information about the book is automatically added to the dataset, which updates on the 6th of every month and runs from April 2005 to March 2022. This dataset contains 39.9 million observations overall with 11 features, though for the purposes of this project we will only be looking at those checked out in 2020 (1.72 million observations). <br>

Ethical concerns to take into consideration revolving this dataset is remembering that this is a limited version of measuring the interests of Seattle citizens. For one, anyone that does not have a library card, or utilizes other library systems such as the University of Washington's, will not be represented. Moreover, as books take a long time to produce, its unlikely that topics with potentially high interests such as pandemics or recent politics were as readily available in physical book form at the time. This means our findings may not be all encompassing of the interests of every Seattle citizen but rather, citizens that use the library system and have prexisting interests prior to 2020. </p>
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