SF-Corpus/EF_Named_Entities

Dataset Card for SF Nexus Extracted Features: Named Entities

Dataset Summary

The SF Nexus EF Named Entities dataset contains named entity files generated from 403 mid-twentieth century science fiction books, originally digitized from Temple University Libraries' Paskow Science Fiction Collection. After digitization, the books were cleaned using Abbyy FineReader. The dataframes in this repository were generated using BookNLP and contain information about the named entities in the texts.

About the SF Nexus Corpus

The Paskow Science Fiction collection contains primarily materials from post-WWII, especially mass-market works of the New Wave era (often dated to 1964-1980). The digitized texts have also been ingested into HathiTrust's repository for preservation and data curation; they are now viewable on HathiTrust's Temple page for non-consumptive research. For more information on the project to digitize and curate a corpus of "New Wave" science fiction, see Alex Wermer-Colan's post on the Temple University Scholars Studio blog, "Building a New Wave Science Fiction Corpus.".

Languages

English

Dataset Structure

This dataset contains 403 csv files containing information about the named entities in each text in the SF corpus. For example:

First line of dataframe: 1908_HODGSON_THEHOUSEONTHEBORDERLAND.txt.entities.csv
{'COREF': 82,
 'start_token': 3,
 'end_token': 4
 'prop': 'NOM',
 'cat': LOC
 'text': 'the borderland
',
}

Data Fields

• COREF: int Unique identifier for each entity used
• start_token: int The start token of entity name
• end_token: int The end token of the entity name; same as the start token for one-word entites; increase by one for each additional word that is part of the token
• prop: str Part of speech of the named entity (example: PROP = proper noun)
• cat: str The type of entity the text has been tagged as (example: LOC = location)
• text: str The text corresponding to the entity

Loading the Dataset

Use the following code to load the dataset in a Python environment (note: does not work with repo set to private)

from datasets import load_dataset

# If the dataset is gated/private, make sure you have run huggingface-cli login
dataset = load_dataset("SF-Corpus/EF_Named_Entities")

Or just clone the dataset repo

git lfs install
git clone https://huggingface.co/datasets/SF-Corpus/EF_Named_Entities
# if you want to clone without large files – just their pointers
# prepend your git clone with the following env var:
GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

For an overview of our approach to data curation of literary texts, see Alex Wermer-Colan’s and James Kopaczewski’s article, “The New Wave of Digital Collections: Speculating on the Future of Library Curation”(2022)

Source Data

The Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio has partnered with Temple University Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) and Digital Library Initiatives (DLI) to build a digitized corpus of copyrighted science fiction literature. Besides its voluminous Urban Archives, the SCRC also houses a significant collection of science-fiction literature. The Paskow Science Fiction Collection was originally established in 1972, when Temple acquired 5,000 science fiction paperbacks from a Temple alumnus, the late David C. Paskow. Subsequent donations, including troves of fanzines and the papers of such sci-fi writers as John Varley and Stanley G. Weinbaum, expanded the collection over the last few decades, both in size and in the range of genres. SCRC staff and undergraduate student workers recently performed the usual comparison of gift titles against cataloged books, removing science fiction items that were exact duplicates of existing holdings. A refocusing of the SCRC’s collection development policy for science fiction de-emphasized fantasy and horror titles, so some titles in those genres were removed as well.

Considerations for Using the Data

This data card only exhibits extracted features for copyrighted fiction; no copyrighted work is being made available for consumption. These digitized files are made accessible for purposes of education and research. Temple University Libraries have given attribution to rights holders when possible. If you hold the rights to materials in our digitized collections that are unattributed, please let us know so that we may maintain accurate information about these materials.

If you are a rights holder and are concerned that you have found material on this website for which you have not granted permission (or is not covered by a copyright exception under US copyright laws), you may request the removal of the material from our site by writing to digitalscholarship@temple.edu.

For more information on non-consumptive research, check out HathiTrust Research Center’s Non-Consumptive Use Research Policy.

Additional Information

Dataset Curators

For a full list of conributors to the SF Nexus project, visit https://sfnexus.io/people/.