Notes of the user group meeting on Dec 11, 2015

Agenda


An Update on the ongoing 'HathiTrust+Bookworm' project: Exploring the Billions and Billions of Words in the HathiTrust Digital Library with Bookworm


Peter Organisciak, Loretta Auvil, Sayan Bhattacharyya

Friday December 11, 2015,  3-4pm ET (2-3pm CT)


The ongoing NEH-funded HT+Bookworm project is a partnership between the HathiTrust Research Center and the 
Cultural Observatory team (that developed the Google Books Ngram Viewer together with Google). The HT+BW tool is intended to assist scholars and their students in navigating the massive HT corpus by providing more powerful visualizations that incorporate multi-faceted “slicing and dicing” of the underlying text data of the HathiTrust Digital Library. 
 

In the April 30, 2015 HTRC User Group Conference Call, we gave an initial presentation on the project. (Notes from that meeting are available here.)

In this  update  taking place during the 
December 11, 2016 HTRC User Group Conference Call, we will discuss with HTRC users the following:

  •  A recent classroom activity using HT+Bookworm that was conducted with undergraduate students as part of the class Comparative Literature 322 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in November 2015 by Sayan Bhattacharyya (HathiTrust Research Center Postdoctoral Fellow), Christi Merrill (Associate Professor, University of Michigan) and Jennifer Tonks (Design Researcher and Learning Specialist, University of Michigan), in conjunction with the Translation Networks project being led by Prof. Merrill

  • Recent and upcoming developments/enhancements to HT+Bookworm  and future plans for HT+BW — an update from Loretta Auvil (Illinois Informatics Institute) and Peter Organisciak (HathiTrust Research Center User Experience Specialist), both of whom are active participants in the development of the HT+Bookworm application.

In addition to Peter, Loretta and Sayan, Christi Merrill and  Jennifer Tonks from the University of Michigan will join us in this conference call as guests, to provide their perspective on the use of HT+Bookworm in the context of undergraduate instruction. Muhammad Shaad Shamim (Rice University), a developer on the HT+Bookworm team, will also join the conference call as a guest for part of the call. This conference call is likely to be useful for scholars, librarians and instructors interested in uses for HT+Bookworm in research projects or classroom teaching in their own institutions.

Here is the slide deck for the first 30 minutes of the meeting.

Also, here is a blog post from the HT+Bookworm blog, describing in words the activity/assignment pertaining to HT+Bookworm that the students actually carried out in Christi Merrill's class (which is what we discussed during the latter half of the presentation of the above slide deck, at this user group meeting.