With quicker, modern, accessible apps allowing us to practice meditation, mindfulness, & furthermore, a pathway to happiness, my curiosity sprouts the question:

“Could the SPL database behave synonymously with the possible checkout decrease in mindful-meditation related items?”

I wanted to explore the activity amongst SPL visitors of those interested in mindfulness / meditation to see whether our technological advancements in ever-growing, simple high-scale meditation apps such as Headspace, Calm, Aura, and even YouTube contributed to the checkout activity. Does the Digital Revolution actually influence the behavior of SPL visitors who’ve checked out meditation-related items in the past?

Noticing the assortments of methods in mindfulness+meditation across Dewey classes, I later decided to add a new direction to additionally visualize the checkout behavior over time on the basis of popularity across dewey classifications.

First query to see overall checkout items + DeweyClasses went as follows:
SELECT YEAR(cout) AS year, bibNumber, title,
COUNT(bibNumber) AS Counts, deweyClass
FROM spl_2016.outraw
WHERE title LIKE '%meditation%' OR title LIKE '%happiness%' OR title LIKE '%mindfulness%' AND deweyClass > 0 AND deweyClass < 1000
GROUP BY YEAR(cout), bibNumber, title, deweyClass
ORDER BY YEAR(cout), bibNumber, title, deweyClass

Second query to organize yearly dewey meditation items, creating multiple annual csv files to quantify ranges of Deweys went as follows:
SELECT
YEAR(cout),
SUBSTRING(deweyClass, 1, 3), bibNumber, title, COUNT(bibNumber) AS Counts, deweyClass
FROM spl_2016.outraw
WHERE YEAR(cout) = 2008 //or any year AND (title LIKE '%meditation%' OR title LIKE '%mindfulness%') AND (SUBSTRING(deweyClass, 1, 3) BETWEEN 1 AND 1000)
GROUP BY SUBSTRING(deweyClass, 1, 3) ASC, YEAR(cout) , bibNumber , title , deweyClass
ORDER BY SUBSTRING(deweyClass, 1, 3) ASC, YEAR(cout) , bibNumber , title , deweyClass

Because meditation is not supposed to convey overwhelming feelings, I wanted to go for a simpler visual approach. This is why aimed to illustrate a simple box graph with soft pastel colors (for visual comfort), showcasing the level of activity based on its brightness.

Through filtering data of items related to mindfulness and/or meditation while also organizing the data on dewey class topics, I discovered several findings of how much meditation passes through the library of Dewey classes. Here are the slides I presented in class to explain further about my what I found digging through the data. PROCESS/ANALYSIS SLIDES

The visualization ended up being fairly straightforward as I hoped it would be a lot more variant. I also used a color palette I made in Illustrator to create a range for the checkout activity. Based on this indication, Dewey Classes 100 (comp sci, info + general works), 200 (philosophy+psychology), 600 (technology) and 700 (arts + recreation) were the most popular nonfiction genres of all the Dewey Classes. As much as they weren't a surprise overall, the lower checkout Dewey Classes struck the most surprise, including social sciences (400) and history/geography(900). Looking deeper into the entries ( demonstrated in the progress presentation slides), tons of interesting book titles were embedded in these minor checkout rate deweyClasses.

Overall, it can be observed that even though our digital technology has fluctuated over time, especially in its features, books related to mindfulness and meditation has always remained consistent in its checkout numbers, especially within the Dewey Classes.

All work is developed within Processing
Source Code + Data