Dewey friend wheel

I’ve been meaning to have a stab at creating something similar to a friend wheel, but using library data, for a while now. Here’s a prototype which uses our “people who borrowed this, also borrowed…” data to try find strong borrowing relationships…
Dewey friends
I picked three random Dewey numbers and hacked together a quick PerlMagick script to draw the wheel:

  • 169 – Logic -> Analogy (orange)
  • 822 – English & Old English literatures -> Drama (purple)
  • 941 – General history of Europe -> British Isles (light blue)

The thickness and brightness of the line indicates the strength of the relationship between the two classifications. For example, for people who borrowed items from 941, we also see heavy borrowing in the 260’s (Christian social theology), 270’s (Christian church history), and the 320’s (Political science).
The next step will be to churn through all of the thousand Dewey numbers and draw a relationship wheel for our entire book stock. I’ve left my work PC on to crunch through the raw data overnight, so hopefully I’ll be able to post the image tomorrow.

If…

…they’d made “The Terminator” 33 years earlier, I’m guessing the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 might have looked like this:
capvid01 capvid02 capvid03 capvid04
One of the things I love about the web is that it delivers all sorts of weird straight to your desktop! In this case, it’s the 15 part serial “Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere“, from 1951, which appears to have had a budget of less than $1 per episode 🙂
The Internet Archive has an episode of the earlier “Captain Video” TV series, which seems to have been made on an even smaller budget 😀