The Botish Library
The Botish Library was conceived and partially developed as part of the final project module for the PGCert Applied Data Science at Birkbeck University.
The project consisted in building a stand-alone printer (using a Raspberry Pi and Python) to print random poems from a dataset of out-of-copyright texts. A little portable Bot-ish (sic!) Library to showcase the British Library collections and fill the world with more poetry.
This work was inspired by French company Short Édition and the short story vending machine in Canary Wharf.
A Short Story Station in Canary Wharf, London.
For this project, I decided to use the British Library’s ‘Digitised printed books (18th-19th century)’ collection. This comprises over 60,000 volumes of 18th and 19th century texts, digitised in partnership with Microsoft and made available under Public Domain Mark. The first step was to identify books containing poetry, by searching through the metadata dataset using key words associated with poetry. I then moved on to extracting individual poems from my dataset and “reshaping” the text to match the print edition, by creating functions to count the number of syllables for each line and add in line breaks to mirror the original poem structure.
My list of poetry terms used to search through the dataset
Using Python to restructure the sonnets so that each line is a new string (above) and matches the line breaks in the print edition (below).
Example of sonnet from Legend of the Death of Antar, an eastern romance. The function that divides the poems into lines could be adapted to accommodate breaks between stanzas as well.
Next steps
The next step in the project is to build the actual printer. The individual components have already been purchased (Adafruit IoT Pi Printer Project Pack and Raspberry Pi 3). I will then have to build the thermal printer with Raspberry Pi and connect it to my poetry dataset. It’s interesting to note that other higher education institutions and libraries have been experimenting with similar ideas - like the University of Idaho Library’s Vandal Poem of the Day Bot and the University of British Columbia’s randomised book recommendations printer for libraries.
Read more about the project in ’The Botish Library: developing a poetry printing machine with Python’
Components of the Adafruit IoT Pi Printer Project Pack.
My own sketch of a printing machine.