Students taking the University of Edinburgh’s Data Science for Design course, run by Dr Benjamin Bach, have been using Library datasets to learn about, and create, data visualisations.


An Interactive Digital Newspaper

Wangjun Qian, Jinrui Wang, Rong Jin, Youwen Zhang, Jingyu Zhou explored the Spiritualist Newspapers collection through different data visualisation techniques.

The group created an interactive digital newspaper, to provide visitors to the library with a
chance to explore the Spiritualist Newspaper dataset at the touch of a finger. The aim was to enable a general reader to gain a quick understanding of this large collection, and to enable users to interact with the newspapers.

Wangjun Qian, Jinrui Wang, Rong Jin, Youwen Zhang, Jingyu Zhou’s project analysing the Spiritualist Newspapers dataset

Data travel through the Industrial Revolution

Philip Han, Yingyue Zhan and Jialing Wu explored the representation of the Industrial Revolution in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They created visualisations of aspects of the dataset which could be explored through a virtual world – with the aim of making history more accessible to public audiences.

By exploring terms relating to energy and minerals (coal, copper, iron, steel, cement), machines (machine, steam, ship, train), and pollutants and disease (pollution, cholera, typhus, fog, plague, disease), the group created an interactive VR game, which encourages users to explore the findings in more detail.

Philip Han, Yingyue Zhan and Jialing Wu’s project exploring representations of the Industrial Revolution in Encyclopaedia Britannica

Explore the code: Data travel project GitHub page


Find out more

More information about the Data Fair: Data Fair 2021 website


Which datasets did these projects use?

These projects used Encyclopaedia Britannica, Scottish School Exam Papers and Britain and UK Handbooks

Encyclopaedia Britannica on the Data Foundry website

Spiritualist Newspapers on the Data Foundry website