Social Topics

Description

I thought I would illustrate the subjects of kids books over time and allow people to interact with the book info. But when I couldn't pull that data from the API and spoke to Xin Xin, I decided to explore other ways of showing how the catalog benefits people in unequal ways, by showing how the books are centered around some "General" topics in comparison with the "Other".

In the end, I didn't use the data from the API that much, because the information was lacking to visualize with the shapes I wanted and because the categories themselves were really interesting to explore. However, I did learn to call from the API and create arrays with the data I captured.

Reflection

The Feminist Data Principle I decided to explore was Challenging Power. A catalog is a reference. It's a guide. If that guide obscures some info, and makes other info easy to find, that makes it unfair. Often, the people creating the catalog don't even think about the info they are hiding. Often they hide it on purpose, because they don't want people to find it. People who don't have power don't even realize that that information is missing. Nor do they know how to advocate for changing the information, because the power is so entrenched.

I wanted people to see how asymmetric and unequal the catalog really is.

Design Process

This is the first time I'm working with APIs. Of course, I had no idea what I was getting into. Books have a lot of interesting meta deta, and tell us a lot about what's going on in the world over time. Seemed like a great idea.

I did some Crazy 4 sketching, and then I made some storyboards of the idea I liked best.

I got the API to call but one thing I noticed is that genre isn't there, although it exists on the Google Books search results page.

Google Books uses this thing called BISAC to categorize books. The closest categories I found were "juvenile fiction" and "juvenile nonfiction", but I needed to go a level or two deeper than that. Google Books allows multiple categories (recommended up to 3), but it wasn't clear which books had those categories listed.

I searched and saw that several other people could not find book genre for their projects in Google Books, Goodreads, or Amazon.

Then I found the Open Library API, which has an experimental subjects API, and the page was updated last in 2010. I explored this a bit but I didn't have high hopes. Sounds like sub genre doesn't want to be found in an easy way.

Then I looked into BISAC a bit more, and realized how much info there was in the categories themselves. So many sub categories under Christianity, but only one for Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and other religions. These book categories are so Christian centric! For example, there was a section for Christian values, but no other religion had a Values subcategory. I'm sure every religions would disagree with that omission. It feels a bit offensive to think that BISAC didn't think to create a subcategory for the Values systems of other religions. There was another section for Social Topics / Values, unrelated to the other religions. Really interesting findings, without even using the API.

I figured out that I can call categories below juvenile nonfiction in my code, even if the API wouldn't actually give me that information. Revelation in a few ways! First is that I can't get this info so easily. Second, that I would have to call each category separately, or focus on one category. I could only pull a max of 40 books at a time, so I had to narrow this project.

I ended up with a project that mostly visualized about the categories, rather than the actual books. I created a sort of navigation system for the cageories, in which the user could mainly go back and forth between the subjects and religions and learn what subcategories are available or not. I think it's a bit confusing, but the simplistic design allows the user to explore the categories and learn when something is just "Not Found" in the categorization system.

Next step is the make a suggestion to BISG about how this catalog could be improved and be more inclusive. At least there's a way to do that!

There is one minor bug for when I click lower down and then on the next screen clieck learn more. For some reason, it takes me back tpo the beginning. This should be easy to fix, but I think I've spent too much time on it that I just need to take a step back to figure it out.