Superduping results next week
A brief note: I got my superduping script working and next week I’ll post some results. With it, I take an ISBN and check thingISBN and xISBN to get the ISBNs that they cluster with it as being other manifestations of the same work. Instead of combining and de-duping the results, as I did before, I run through the ISBNs one by one, and if an ISBN has only been seen at one service I look it up at the other and grab all of the ISBNs that were clustered with it. All of those ISBNs will be new, and I can check on them back at the first service. I go back and forth, using each service’s results to break apart the fragmentation at the other service, forming a maximal superset of ISBNs. This process I call superduping.
When I combined and de-duped the results for my copy of The Hobbit from thingISBN (217 ISBNs) and xISBN (5) I got a total of 221 ISBNs. xISBN’s number was so low that obviously it didn’t have the ISBN of my manifestation grouped in with others. By superduping, I got over 1200 ISBNs! That kind of result won’t happen often, but even for more common works the results were interesting. More on all this next week.