MITH is pleased to announce that we have been awarded $39,690 from the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) for a prototyping grant in support of the HTRC’s Workset Creation For Scholarly Analysis project. In collaboration with HTRC, MITH will develop a prototype application to facilitate the distributed correction and enhancement of HathiTrust metadata records.
This work builds directly on several previous MITH projects, including a system for HathiTrust metadata correction developed by Travis Brown, MITH Assistant Director of Research and Development, as part of a partnership between MITH and the Princeton Prosody Archive, as well as work with Faculty Fellow Peter Mallios and the Foreign Literatures in America (FLA) team. We are excited to be pushing this work forward in ways that will help make the HathiTrust an increasingly useful resource for scholars.
As part of this new project, MITH will continue to collaborate with Mallios and the FLA team to develop a set of services and interfaces that will allow the FLA project (and other projects like it) to pull metadata records from the HathiTrust, correct and annotate these records using standardized vocabularies, gather corrections and annotations from other teams or scholars, and export enhanced metadata in formats suitable for publication as linked data. The design of this prototype application is intended to leverage the effort of scholars as they identify and select relevant resources from the HathiTrust corpus to create collections (“worksets”) useful for scholarly analyses. Mallios and the FLA team will experiment with using the prototype to continue their work studying the reception of foreign and immigrant authored literary works in the U.S., in interdisciplinary terms that encompass literature, culture, politics, history, and international relations. The MITH team will include Research Programmer Raffaele Viglianti and Project Manager Stephanie Sapienza, as well as Project Director Trevor Muñoz.
The HathiTrust Research Center’s Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis: Prototyping Project (WCSA) is a two-year effort, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which aims to engage scholars in designing tools for exploration, location, and analytic grouping of materials so they can routinely conduct computational scholarship at scale, based on meaningful worksets.
For more information, please contact Trevor Muñoz.