Geography of Taste

Background

GeoTaste is an interactive geospatial web application built in Python and Dash that enables the exploration and comparison of borrowing patterns among the patrons of the historic Shakespeare and Company lending library, bookstore, and publishing house in Paris. Its founder, Sylvia Beach, first published James Joyce’s controversial Ulysses in 1922 and was born in Princeton. Beach’s meticulous records are stored in the Princeton Library’s archives and are available in digital formats through a large-scale web application, directed by Kotin and Lead RSE Rebecca Koeser, called The Shakespeare and Company Project. GeoTaste builds on Koeser and Kotin’s larger project.

Contribution

Heuser developed a proof-of-concept framework for geospatial comparison in Jupyter notebooks and developed and deployed a prototype in pure Python with Dash-Plotly. This prototype allows researchers to interactively map and statistically compare customized groupings of Shakespeare and Company data according to specified demographic and literary categories within the library’s patrons, the books they borrowed, and their authors.