Writing / Essay / Tool

Converting Books to JSON

A writing artifact that also reads as a workflow and data-conversion case study.

CLMP directories Digital humanities Data extraction

What the project does

The project takes scanned PDF issues of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Directory of Literary Magazines and turns them into structured JSON. The work passes through OCR-like text extraction, cleanup, field normalization, and data modeling.

That makes it more than a one-off conversion exercise. It becomes a reusable method for translating print-era publishing artifacts into data that can be searched, compared, and reinterpreted.

Why it matters

This is one of the strongest bridge artifacts in the archive because it joins archival research, publishing history, scripting, and structured data work in a single piece.

It also shows the Writing track doing something more than commentary: the page records a real transformation pipeline and explains why that pipeline matters for humanities work.

Related Work

Other artifacts connected by publishing systems, data structure, and archival thinking.