Working with very large corpora: Building your worksets in the HathiTrust

Kevin Page, Iain Emsley and David Weigl talk about using The
HathiTrust Digital Library to conduct research in this interstice
workshop. Within the Andrew W. Mellon funded ‘Workset Creation for
Scholarly Analysis (WCSA)’ project, the University of Oxford
e-Research Centre have developed new tools and approaches to
facilitate study of the HathiTrust Digital Library. This workshop
will inform participants of the latest developments from the
project, and provide attendees with the opportunity to work with
project researchers to explore how they might undertake their own
investigations. The HathiTrust Digital Library comprises the
digitized representations of 14.7 million volumes, 7.44 million
book titles, 405,345 serial titles, and 5.2 billion pages, best
described as “a partnership of major research institutions and
libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved
and accessible long into the future”. For many scholars the size of
the HT corpus is both attractive and daunting. The first half of
this workshop introduces the concept of ‘worksets’, showing how
they can be used to effectively investigate large corpora such as
the HathiTrust, and demonstrating digital methods to refine and
interrogate the data within them. These will be illustrated through
existing worksets, including examples focussed on early English
printed texts. In the second, interactive, half of the workshop,
attendees will work with project researchers to ‘paper prototype’
potential worksets relating to their own fields of study.
Participants will be apprised of existing methods by which they can
create HathiTrust worksets for their context; discovery of new
workset creation motivations and strategies is welcomed and inform
the next generation of HathiTrust workset tooling.