The resulting dataset lets us look at checkout trends amongst widely held titles, and verify some intuitions about literary circulation, like the tight correlation of checkouts by books in the Harry Potter series.

Library Checkouts for the Top 500 “Greatest” Novels – Responsible Datasets in Context

Second, we published another project with the SPL's open checkout data, this time merging the checkouts with the OCLC Top 500 most held novels across libraries. www.responsible-datasets-in-context.com/posts/spl-50...

The dataset provides important biographical and demographic info about US governors, and lets us observe trends in variables like military experience and secondary education over time.

Had fun working on two new datasets for the Responsible Datasets in Context project. First, I'm excited to share a dataset of US governors from 1775-present which was put together by a group of political scientists based out of Yale. www.responsible-datasets-in-context.com/posts/gubern...

One pattern we uncover: authors often experience circulation spikes after their death. doi.org/10.63744/P6q...

Graphs showing authors from the Norton Anthology receiving checkout spikes after their death.

Excited to be in Luxembourg at CHR 2025 to hear about everyone’s amazing work and to share my project with @mellymeldubs.bsky.social and our team. We tracked canonical authors and texts in Seattle Public Library circulation data.

TikTok for Developers Build awesome experiences and powerful tools that inspire creativity and allow users to create, connect, and share with the world.

Hi Federico, we use the TikTok Research API at developers.tiktok.com/doc/research... to download metadata for all videos that fit a
set of parameters!

Seattle Public Library’s Open Checkout Data: What Can It Tell Us About Readers and Book Popularity More Broadly? | Journal of Open Humanities Data The Seattle Public Library (SPL) publishes anonymized, open-access checkout data for every item in its collection, dating from 2005 to the present. To our knowledge, it is the only U.S. library to release checkout data by title with this level of temporal detail: one dataset records exact timestamps for print book checkouts, while another provides monthly aggregates across all formats (e.g., ebooks, audiobooks, print books). Because U.S. book sales data is largely inaccessible outside the publishing industry, SPL’s open checkout data offers a rare and valuable alternative. But how well does it generalize beyond Seattle? Does it reflect book sales? And what can it tell us about readers more broadly?

David Christensen, @mellymeldubs.bsky.social & I wrote about the Seattle Public Library open checkout dataset. The data is idiosyncratic and imperfect—but also a rare, detailed look at book popularity over time. Excited to see how others put it to use!

openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/articles/10....