Self-Powered Mission 01. Turning the Books at Home into a Database
1. Sketching out the database
1-1) Organizing in Excel
This spring, while tidying up my study,
it suddenly hit me,
if I sorted out the categories and ratios of the books here,
couldn't I extract data about the question, "What kind of person am I?" That curiosity kicked in.
1.
Let's make the data!
1-1
First, I set up the columns as Category, Book Title, Author, Publisher, Price, Subtitle or Summary.
1-2
The reasoning behind each column was:
Category — to read personal taste through the weight of each category.
Book Title — not just a name tag, but a way to guess which keywords or types of copy give me that "have-to-buy" itch.
Author — wouldn't high-frequency authors give the person a kind of character?
Price — this might actually be a more meaningful indicator than simple count.
Subtitle or Summary — honestly, this is the stretch goal. I wanted to try morphological analysis. I thought recurring keywords might surface.
2.
To do any kind of statistical analysis, the data needs to be organized in some form.
For now, I'll go with Excel. Out of all the various formats out there, nothing beats Excel for this.
2-1
Well.. at first I could fill things in carefully. Flipping through each book..
2-2
But.. the categories started getting blurry. So I made a compromise. Category — just look it up on Kyobo Book or Aladin and fill it in!
For now, just write fast.
2-3
But this ate up a huge amount of time.
Open the book, look, find it, put the book down, type it into the computer..
Ugh.. who am I, where am I..
For a while I only logged the items I could find right away, and then
2-4
Was typing each one of these by hand really something a 21st-century human should be doing?! It felt too stupid.
In the end I decided to only record the book titles. Heh.. actually, I had a plan..
Once everything was logged, the total came out to 437 books.
I didn't include periodicals like HBR, DBR, Unitas Brand, or Magazine B.
The concepts of those periodicals themselves are clear, but the content inside each issue wasn't chosen by me —
it's subscription content curated by the publisher, so I figured it wouldn't count as meaningful data.
