Upcoming Talk (September 18) on HathiTrust Research Center: Strategic approaches to opening research opportunities on closed data

HathiTrust Research Center: Strategic approaches to opening research opportunities on closed data

Hall Center Seminar Room

Monday, September 18, 3:30pm 

Abstract: The HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) contains some 15.8 million volumes (over 5.5 billion pages). Unfortunately, roughly 10 million HTDL volumes are under copyright restrictions and cannot be shared with users. To overcome this problem, the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is creating a set of "non-consumptive research" services to make these closed materials more open and thus more useful to scholars.  This talk introduces such non-consumptives services as "Data Capsules," "Extracted Features" and the "Bookworm + HathiTrust" tool. Each HTRC service is designed to open new points of access to otherwise closed data while still respecting all copyright limitations. Examples of real-world Digital Humanities research projects and services that have been using the HTRC data and resources will be highlighted. Future research ideas, building on recent grant-funded projects, will also be discussed.
 
Speaker Bio: J. Stephen Downie is the Associate Dean for Research and a Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Downie is the Illinois Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC). Downie is the leader of the Hathitrust + Bookworm (HT+BW) text analysis project that is creating tools to visualize the evolution of term usage over time. Professor Downie represents the HTRC on the NOVEL(TM) text mining project and the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA) project, both funded by the SSHRC Partnership Grant programme. Professor Downie is also the Principal Investigator on the Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis + Data Capsules (WCSA+DC) project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. All of these aforementioned projects share a common thread of striving to provide large-scale analytic access to copyright-restricted cultural data. Downie has been very active in the establishment of the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) community through his ongoing work with the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) conferences. He was ISMIR's founding President and now serves on the ISMIR board. Over the past year, Professor Downie has been working with Dunhuang Academy on the "Digital Dunhuang" project to help connect Digital Humanities scholars with the high-resolution digital materials capturing the Mogao Caves. Professor Downie holds a BA (Music Theory and Composition) along with a Master's and a PhD in Library and Information Science, all earned at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.