In collaboration with the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), MITH will develop a prototype application to facilitate the distributed correction and enhancement of HathiTrust metadata records. This project is part of the HTRC’s Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis: Prototyping Project (WCSA), 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.
MITH will work with Faculty Fellow Peter Mallios and the Foreign Literatures in America (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.
In addition to leveraging previous collaborations with Mallios and FLA, this work builds directly on previous MITH work by Travis Brown, MITH Assistant Director of Research and Development, on a system for HathiTrust metadata correction developed by as part of a partnership between MITH and the Princeton Prosody Archive.