171. The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC): Mining the 17 Million Volumes of the HathiTrust Digital Li... (56:58)

Date:
2020-11-04
Main contributors:
Christie, Jennifer, Kloster, David, Walsh, John
Summary:
The HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) was founded in 2008 with just over 2 million volumes in the collection. Today there are over 17 million volumes ranging from 6th-century psalters to 21st-century academic texts. The diverse contents of the HTDL include government documents, academic journal articles, and monographs from all the disciplines one would find represented in a typical academic research library. While the majority of materials are in English, there are many volumes in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Latin. Researchers may perform text analysis on the contents of HTDL by utilizing the many text analysis tools and data sets provided by the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC). The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), based at IU Bloomington, develops infrastructure, tools, and services to support Text Data Mining of the HTDL corpus. These include off-the-shelf web-based text analysis tools, a secure data capsule computing environment for analysis of rights-restricted content, and the HTRC Extracted Features Data Set, which provides volume-level and page-level word counts and other metadata for the entire corpus. This presentation will discuss the current contents of the HTDL collection and its benefits as a data source and provide examples of existing research facilitated by HTDL collections and HTRC resources. In addition, this presentation will give an overview of the various HTRC text analysis tools and the different options for analyzing public domain and copyrighted material.

172. The Digitization of the IU Bicentennial Student Newspapers (43:18)

Date:
2020-03-04
Main contributors:
Dalmau, Michelle, Watkins, Jennifer
Summary:
Students are at the heart of a university campus. How students respond to local, national, and international events provides insight into student life and their socio-historical contexts that define a campus and that campus’ unique history. The Bicentennial Student Newspapers Project aims to digitize student newspapers across five IU campuses: IU East, IUPUI, IU Kokomo, IU Northwest and IU South Bend. Those papers will join the IU Southeast student newspapers already digitized to create a rich corpus of IU-wide student newspapers ripe for research. Once digitized, over 50,000 pages of student newspapers spanning the 1930s to the 2010s will be available for discovery in Pages Online by Summer 2020.

173. Making History in the Midwest: A Tale of Two History Harvests (43:58)

Date:
2020-01-29
Main contributors:
Craig, Kalani, Moyd, Michelle
Summary:
This brown bag documents the early stages of a community-engagement project with digital foundations. Our “History Harvest” is an ongoing invitation to community members to help shape an archive about identity and material culture at IUB. We’ll talk about the teaching, research, and ethical considerations that framed partnerships between IUB community members, two research centers, the libraries, and an undergraduate and graduate course and walk through some practical responses to those considerations that will shape the History Harvest as it moves forward.

180. “Sensing” Place: Habit Change in the Mobile, Connected Present (44:33)

Date:
2020-11-18
Main contributors:
Heidi Rae Cooley
Summary:
We live in an age when mobile touchscreen devices are customarily “on” and in-hand. As a consequence, we frequently engage in practices that involve documenting the self in motion, our geolocational beads (or arrows) locating us and guiding us to destinations of interest (e.g., ATMs, gas stations, restaurants, friend’s houses). These are the sorts of habits our technologies engender. And I contend that, in doing so, they help form and regulate conduct in a nonconscious, habitual—even neurophysiological—manner. In which case, it is at the nonconscious level of existence that habit change needs to work. In this talk, I will draw on American pragmatist Charles Sanders Pierce’s account of habit change to discuss how our geolocative devices might orient us differently in relation to the landscapes and urban terrains we traverse. To provide example of what habit change might look like in the mobile, connected present, I discuss three collaborative mapping projects in whose design and development I have participated. These projects—Augusta App, Ghosts of the Horseshoe, and Ward One App—have afforded me opportunities to explore how the very mechanisms through which technologies of connectivity and location awareness shape habit might also serve as vehicles for re-appropriating social, political histories and practices in the service of habit change.