fiction

Ted Underwood has been poking around in the massive HathiTrust database for a few years now, and it’s taught him that libraries are anything but uniform. During his talk with the Sawyer Seminar on Friday, Sept. 20, at the University of Pittsburgh, Underwood, a professor of English and information science at the University of Illinois, pictured his child-self walking through physical libraries, looking for books. He never guessed that every other library in existence didn’t catalogue their books in exactly the same way. But, as he now works with the metadata associated with digitized books in the HathiTrust database, he’s realized the human side of library science a bit more. He’s learned quite a bit about how physical libraries operate, he admitted. While there is national coordination with Library of Congress cataloguing standards, many of the decisions are up to individual librarians, he said. Underwood was the second speaker in the Sawyer Seminar yearlong series entitled “Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) from the Quantitative to the Digital Age.” He first spoke at a public lecture on Thursday, Sept. 19, and then for Sawyer Seminar participants on Friday. Many of Underwood’s projects deal with large collections of data, including the HathiTrust database, which stores the digitized collections of several universities totaling over 17 million volumes. In the past, he and his collaborators have leveraged that data to find that the number of women writers of fiction declined from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He and his team at Illinois are mining HathiTrust for their latest Read More