An interactive Quarto site for exploring metadata of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society across 1665–1886 — 8,545 articles, 2,679 unique author surface forms, 25 topical labels.
Part of the Secrets to Patent project.
🌐 Live site: https://digitalhistory-lund.github.io/SecToPat-PhilTransExplorer/
| Path | Purpose |
|---|---|
index.qmd, topics.qmd, authors.qmd, length.qmd, dashboard.qmd, browse.qmd, about.qmd |
Site pages |
_quarto.yml |
Quarto site config |
scripts/build_derivatives.py |
Reads corpus/data/index.db → writes pre-aggregated CSV/JSON to data/derivatives/ |
data/derivatives/ |
Generated artifacts the site consumes; rebuildable, committed |
corpus/ |
Git submodule containing the source SQLite catalogue (private) |
robots.txt |
Denies all crawlers except the Internet Archive |
- ✅ Aggregate counts (articles per year, per topic, per author, per page length).
- ✅ Per-article bibliographic metadata: title, DOI, year, topic, author names, link to the article on royalsocietypublishing.org.
- ❌ The raw SQLite metadata file.
- ❌ Internal paths or URLs.
The scripts/build_derivatives.py script enforces this boundary at build time.
Prerequisites: Quarto ≥ 1.7 and Python ≥ 3.11.
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/DigitalHistory-Lund/SecToPat-PhilTransExplorer.git
cd SecToPat-PhilTransExplorer
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
# Quarto's pre-render hook calls build_derivatives.py automatically:
quarto preview # local dev with auto-reload
# or:
quarto render # one-shot build into _site/The build script asserts that totals reconcile (8,545 articles, 455 Experiment
articles, 8,081 articles with numeric pagination) and that no forbidden
columns leak into data/derivatives/.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
(CC BY-NC 4.0). See LICENSE.
If you use this site or its derivative data, please cite the Zenodo deposit:
10.5281/zenodo.20162091.
Machine-readable metadata is in CITATION.cff.
For questions or feedback, contact Mathias Johansson at MathiasJohansson@kultur.lu.se, or open an issue.