129 Center for Digital Scholarship
The HathiTrust is a collection of 14 million research library electronic texts digitized by Google, and this hands-on class teaches participants how to use computers to analyze these materials.
Sometimes called "distant" or "scalable" reading — forms of digital humanities research — this class demonstrates ways to literally count & tabulate the frequency of words in a text in order to find patterns & anomalies within it. Based on the resulting analysis, it is possible to more quickly learn what a corpus is about when compared to reading the corpus without the use of a computer. HathiTrust materials lend themselves quite easily to this sort of analysis.
There are no prerequisites, but participants may want to bring their own laptop to the session.
Eric Lease Morgan, Digital Initiatives Librarian