Project will help researchers explore big data in HathiTrust digitized library | www.lis.illinois.edu

"Illinois English professor Ted Underwood wants to know how the language describing male and female characters in works of fiction has changed since the late eighteenth century. He’s using data mining tools to gather information from thousands of books to answer that question. The problem, though, is that books published after 1922 are still under copyright protection and their content can’t be shared freely online A project of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC)—a collaboration between the University of Illinois and Indiana University—aims to get around that problem and allow scholars to analyze large numbers of books while still respecting copyright laws. The project is being funded by a two-year, $1.17 million grant from the Mellon Foundation ... New tools under development at the HathiTrust Research Center will create metadata to better describe the works and search individual pieces to find required information. They will also allow scholars to visualize the data they get in response to a query—for example, how much information comes from a certain time period or geographic region ..."