February 6, 2015
The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is pleased to announce the recipients of its inaugural Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS) projects. For the inaugural round, HTRC received a total of nine proposals from scholars from a broad set of institutions and research fields.
Each proposal was carefully reviewed for feasibility, research methodology, suitability of the proposed collaboration to HTRC staff availability, availability of the needed data in time for project beginning, and potential adaptability of the outcomes to the broader HTRC community.
Three projects were selected in this first round:
- Detecting Literary Plagiarisms: The Case of Oliver Goldsmith. Douglas Duhaime. University of Notre Dame: Duhaime will work on developing tools for detecting plagiarisms. He will focus on the case of Oliver Goldsmith, to detect the literary thefts of Goldsmith by using machine learning techniques.
- Taxonomizing the Texts: Towards Cultural-Scale Models of Full Text. Colin Allen, Jaimie Murdock. Indiana University Bloomington. Allen and Murdock will carry out a cultural-scale investigation and topic modeling on HT public-domain full text through random sampling to select collections according to the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).
- The Trace of Theory. Geoffrey Rockwell, Laura Mandell, Stefan Sinclair, Matthew Wilkens, Susan Brown. University of Alberta, Texas A&M University, University of Notre Dame. Rockwell, Mandell, Sinclair, Wilkens, and Brown aim to subset theoretical subsets from the HT public corpus and apply large-scale topic modeling on the subsets. The researchers will develop tools and computational methods for tracking the concept of "theory”.
- Additionally, an ACS award was made to Dr. Michelle Alexopoulos, a scholar in economics from the University of Toronto, who is tracking technology diffusion through time using the HT corpus.
Each awardee will have dedicated HTRC staff time for a period of 3-6 months. After that, HTRC looks forward to engaging another round of ACS awardees.
HTRC ACS program is funded in part by HathiTrust, Indiana University, and University of Illinois.