The BBC "In Our Time" radio programme publishes suggested recommending reading in the programme data in an unstructured and citation style way: author, title (publisher, year), with what looks to be conventional character string separators between references (at least on the pages I looked at).

The idea is to extract and link suggested readings for the In Our time programmes to open, structured bibliographic data. This would make the In Our Time archive even more useful as an informal (open-ish) educational resource, especially as academic libraries start to release data relating to books used on courses. (So for example, this approach might help provide a link from a course to a relevant In Our Time broadcast via a common book.)

submitted 20 Jan '11, 13:36

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psychemedia
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I have had a go at implementing this using the BNB data via bibliographica:

Blog post: http://www.aurochs.org/aurlog/2011/02/16/in-our-time-booklist/

Script: http://www.aurochs.org/inourtime_booklist/inourtime_booklist_v1.php

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solved 16 Feb '11, 16:23

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I've posted a Scraperwiki scrape of the BBC In Our Time archive programme pages that includes a column containing suggested reading items from the most recent programmes in an unstructured way; the single books column may contain multiple book references, in a variety of unstructured, though occasionally conventional, forms.

The scripts Orangeaurochs posted contains detectors and parsers of some of these unstructured formats, but I haven't integrated them in the scraperwiki - instead, the scraperwiki database may be regarded as a resource that needs parsing...

It is possible to run the In Our Time programme descriptions through Reuters' Open Calais system to identify the names and affiliations of guests included in the programme with a reasonable degree of reliability. (I wonder, should I try to parse out a column containing the paragraph that references discussants?) An example of what we can do with the participant data is described in the post Visualising OU Academic Participation with the BBC’s “In Our Time”

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solved 23 Mar '11, 00:05

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edited 23 Mar '11, 00:05

The BL have just released the first version of their new BNB linked data service which includes a SPARQL interface. I managed to tweak the booklist programme to interrogate the new BNB service instead of the now dead Bibliographica service. The no. of results are not impressive, hopefully due to the relatively small sample of records included at the moment, but it does at least work: http://www.aurochs.org/inourtime_booklist/inourtime_booklist_v3.php?http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00775pm

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solved 15 Jul '11, 16:56

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Asked: 20 Jan '11, 13:36

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Last updated: 15 Jul '11, 16:56

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