After some attempts at identifyng and collecting names in EEBO-TCP dedications with named-entity recognition, I decided to instead attempt to streamline the manual collection of names.
This simple web app, built on the Flask microframework, takes a series of plaintext files of dedications (derived from the EEBO-TCP xml), and serves them to a user who can add names to a csv file by highlighting them. This method still requires visually scanning each dedication, but makes the data entry and management a little easier and a lot quicker. I also used Twitter bootstrap to create a readable interface.
To try it out for yourself, simply download the files (or clone the repo), navigate to the newly-created directory on the command line, and run with python run.py
.