There are a lot of different fields within mechanical engineering, but the one that I'm most interested in is engineering design. This last spring term, a professor at BYU sponsored a research project looking at historical trends in engineering design publications. I applied and was selected to be on the team of three.
Basically, I wrote a multi-threaded scripted to gather data from the Library of Congress. We then analyzed the data and identified some major trends in engineering design publications. We created a video (below) to show our findings. The video's not the best quality, but I only had a week to do all the filming (with an inexpensive camcorder and no external microphone... Sorry!), get the photos, put in all the effects with the graphs, and do all the editing. But I still think it turned out pretty well:
(It looks our blog layout is cutting off the edge of the video... Sorry! You can also watch it on YouTube here.
In all, we obtained over 150,000 books published on the topic of engineering design, but only about 100,000 of them had a known publication date and a publication language. I built a quick data viewer that uses Google's Charts API to quickly show the results, accessible at http://loc.travisvanderson.com.
It was a really fun project to work on, and I really learned a lot!
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