Giving Shape to Large Digital Libraries through Exploratory Data Analysis

Organisciak, Peter; Schmidt, Benjamin M.; Downie, J. Stephen

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/110098 Copy

Description

Title

Giving Shape to Large Digital Libraries through Exploratory Data Analysis

Author(s)

• Organisciak, Peter
• Schmidt, Benjamin M.
• Downie, J. Stephen

Issue Date

2021-07

Keyword(s)

• digital libraries
• exploratory data analysis
• text analysis
• visualization

Abstract

The emergence of large multi-institutional digital libraries has opened the door to aggregate-level examinations of the published word. Such large-scale analysis offers a new way to pursue traditional problems in the humanities and social sciences, using digital methods to ask routine questions of large corpora. However, inquiry into multiple centuries of books is constrained by the burdens of scale, where statistical inference is technically complex and limited by hurdles to access and flexibility. This work examines the role that exploratory data analysis and visualization tools may play in understanding large bibliographic datasets. We present one such tool, HathiTrust+Bookworm, which allows multi-faceted exploration of the multi-million work HathiTrust Digital Library, and center it in the broader space of scholarly tools for exploratory data analysis.

Publisher

Wiley

Series/Report Name or Number

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/110098

DOI

10.1002/asi.24547

Sponsor(s)/Grant Number(s)

NEH #HK-50176-14

Owning Collections