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UC Data Week – Visualizing Islamic Manuscripts data at UCLA Library
February 13 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Speaker: Saad Shaukat (UCLA)
UCLA library holds one of the largest collections of Islamic manuscripts (roughly 10,000 items) covering multiple languages including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu, and spanning nearly 9 centuries (12th-20th). Currently, UCLA Library Special Collections is in the process of a multi-year effort to create digital records for its Islamic Manuscript holdings. At HumTech, our team is engaged in a project to visualize the cataloged manuscripts through Tableau. The goal of this project is to represent a birds eye view of the Islamic manuscript holdings for interested researchers. Through representation of multiple data points that the library cataloging process captured from the manuscripts, the visualization hopes to provide easy access to researchers for dissecting the data in multiple ways and helping them in drawing useful insights into the Islamic manuscript holdings at UCLA. In this presentation, we will be discussing the challenges that we faced in data cleaning, wrangling and visualization that are specific to manuscript collections, especially one that is primarily in non-Latin script and spans to the pre-modern period.